Question

I recently asked this question How to persist anon user selection (ex: theme selection). and started to learn about ASP.NET profiles and their properties in the web config. I tried the answer from the link but i was unable to access profile.newproperty

How to assign Profile values?
This question specifies that web-applications don’t support profile out of the box and a custom model based on ProfileBase must be created. The question was answered in 2009 and I wanted to know if this is still the same case.

In a ASP.NET 4.0 web application can I access profile.newproperty with a property i defined in the section in the web.config without needing to code C# except when accessing it.

Answer 1

I just saw your question, yes you are right, the answer I posted was related to web sites and therefore, it doesn’t work with Web Applications or MVC

Here I will show you code to work with profiles in MVC using anonymous and authenticated user profiles

Output

Anonymous user – No profile set yet

Anonymous user – profile set

Authenticated user – profile migrated

Web.config

<anonymousIdentification enabled="true"/>
<profile inherits="ProfileInWebApplicationMVC1.UserProfile">
  <providers>
    <clear/>
    <add name="AspNetSqlProfileProvider" type="System.Web.Profile.SqlProfileProvider" connectionStringName="ApplicationServices" applicationName="/" />
  </providers>
</profile>

UserProfile class

public class UserProfile : ProfileBase
{
    public static UserProfile GetProfile()
    {
        return HttpContext.Current.Profile as UserProfile;
    }

    [SettingsAllowAnonymous(true)]
    public DateTime? LastVisit
    {
        get { return base["LastVisit"] as DateTime?; }
        set { base["LastVisit"] = value; }
    }

    public static UserProfile GetProfile(string userID)
    {
        return ProfileBase.Create(userID) as UserProfile;
    }
}

Home controller

    public ActionResult Index()
    {
        ViewBag.Message = "Welcome to ASP.NET MVC!";

        var p = UserProfile.GetProfile();

        return View(p.LastVisit);
    }

    [HttpPost]
    public ActionResult SaveProfile()
    {
        var p = UserProfile.GetProfile();

        p.LastVisit = DateTime.Now;
        p.Save();

        return RedirectToAction("Index");
    }

Index view

@if (!this.Model.HasValue)
{
    @: No profile detected
}
else
{
    @this.Model.Value.ToString()
}

@using (Html.BeginForm("SaveProfile", "Home"))
{
    <input type="submit" name="name" value="Save profile" />
}

And finally, when you are an anonymous user you can have your own profile however, once you register to the site, you need to migrate your current profile to be used with your new account. This is because ASP.Net membership, creates a new profile when a user logs-in

Global.asax, code to migrate profiles

    public void Profile_OnMigrateAnonymous(object sender, ProfileMigrateEventArgs args)
    {
        var anonymousProfile = UserProfile.GetProfile(args.AnonymousID);
        var f = UserProfile.GetProfile(); // current logged in user profile

        if (anonymousProfile.LastVisit.HasValue)
        {
            f.LastVisit = anonymousProfile.LastVisit;
            f.Save();
        }

        ProfileManager.DeleteProfile(args.AnonymousID);
        AnonymousIdentificationModule.ClearAnonymousIdentifier();
        Membership.DeleteUser(args.AnonymousID, true);
    }