Question

When I’m evaluating a SharePoint list’s custom field of type ‘User’ I’d expect to only get the username but instead I’m seeing additional characters at the start that I need to trim out.

SPContext.Current.ListItem[NameOfUserField] has the value of

“14;#DeeMac”

And as a side note – this field is being treated as a string – but in my xml files I’ve defined it as a ‘User’ field type – where and why has this conversion been made? I did originally try to cast it as SPFieldUser which failed.

Answer 1

The first part of the string is that user’s ID in the SPWeb in question. I.e. DeeMac is, roughly speaking, the 14th person to use that web.

In order to get an SPUser object from that string, you need to take the SPWeb to which the user belongs and call the SPFieldUserValue(SPWeb, string) constructor with the two.

The SPFieldUserValue thus constructed contains a User property of type SPUser, which may be null if the string was null/empty.

Note that sometimes, I think, a user column may actually contain SPFieldUserValue objects already, instead of strings.

Also if it’s a multi-user column, it might contain a SPFieldUserValueCollection object or a string to pass into that class’s constructor.

If you ever run into issues, debug and check what’s actually in your column.