Question

I have an MVC3 application and I would like to give the users the ability to set preferences that would be enabled when the user logs in.

I really don’t have any idea where to start with this and would really appreciate being pointed in the right direction. I did try some changes to the membership class but now I am thinking that’s probably not the best way to go about things.

Answer 1

You could do it in a database (sounds like you might be using one at least with the out-of-the-box membership provider) once uniquely identifying a user. In that case, you may want to implement your own membership provider.

You have to do a little work to start implementing your own provider. If this is your only requirement, you might be able to avoid it by writing your own class that returns settings in a format of your choosing

public static class UserSettings
{
    public static string GetSettings(IPrincipal user)
    {
        if(user.Identity.IsAuthenticated)
        {
            // dip into database using user.Identity.Name property
            return "string with user settings";
            // this also assumes user.Identity.Name is uniquely able
            // to identify a user in your database!
        }

        return string.Empty;
    }
}

Or, if the information is completely trivial, maybe you could implement a cookie representation of the user settings. This, of course, comes with all the caveats of using cookies, but you could avoid storing the information in a database

Anywhere you have an HttpContext you could grab the settings value like so:

if(HttpContext.Current != null)
{
    string userSettings = HttpRequest.Current.Request.Cookies["NameOfCookie"];
}