I've managed to spend some days to understand the Audience Targeting functionality of SharePoint Server 2007 (MOSS). I wish to share my conclusions:
* Global Audiences (rule-based, SSP) is OOTB only possible when using SharePoint UserProfiles. I wanted to bind it to an ASP.NET Profile Provider, but that's not possible.
* The Global Audiences (rule-based) functionality is realized directly in-database via stored-procedures.
* It is possible to target (changing visibility) Web Parts to SharePoint Groups.
* If you target a Web Part to a "ASP.NET RoleProvider"-role by adding the role to a Sharepoint Group does not work. (Forms Based Authentication)
* It is possible to override the "TargetTo"-FieldType by replacing the 12\Template\xml\fldtypes_TargetTo.xml file with your own version. This way you are able to hook your own FieldControl into the Audience-functionality.
* Most code which is related to Targeting is hardwired to use "Microsoft.Office.Server.Audience.AudienceManager". It is thus not easy replaceable or extendable
* The ContentByQuery-WebPart is hardwired to use field with ID "{61cbb965-1e04-4273-b658-eedaa662f48d}" as Audience-field.
* The AuthorizationFilter.Editor of Web Parts is buggy. When removing Sharepoint Groups as Target, many strange bugs become apparent.
* It is not possible to manually AudienceFilter the ContentByQuery-WebPart by selecting the "Audience"-field as filter. It gave me an error because it was trying to compare an ntext- with an nvarchar-column.
I wrote the following class to be able to correctly use RoleProvider-roles as Sharepoint-groups for targeting Web Parts. You should register the class as ResourceFilter in the web.config of your SharePoint-site.
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
using Microsoft.Office.Server.Audience;
using System.Collections;
using System.Globalization;
using Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages;
using Microsoft.SharePoint;
namespace AudienceManagerUI
{ /// <summary>
/// Replace <RuntimeFilter Assembly="Microsoft.Office.Server, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" Class="Microsoft.Office.Server.Audience.AudienceManager" BuilderURL="audience_chooser.aspx" />
/// With <RuntimeFilter Assembly="AudienceManagerUI, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=6cb89fff80058439" Class="AudienceManagerUI.PatchedResourceManager" BuilderURL="audience_chooser.aspx" />
/// </summary>
public class PatchedResourceManager : Microsoft.SharePoint.WebPartPages.IRuntimeFilter2
{ private Microsoft.Office.Server.Audience.AudienceManager audienceManager = new Microsoft.Office.Server.Audience.AudienceManager();
public ArrayList InitializeStrings(CultureInfo cultureInfO)
{ return audienceManager.InitializeStrings(cultureInfO);
}
public IToolPaneControl GetToolPaneControl()
{ return audienceManager.GetToolPaneControl();
}
public bool IsFilterActive()
{ return audienceManager.IsFilterActive();
}
/// <summary>
/// Checks that the values in the IsIncludedFilter property are valid before they are saved
/// </summary>
/// <param name="PersistedString"></param>
/// <returns></returns>
public string ValidateIsIncludedFilter(string PersistedString)
{ return audienceManager.ValidateIsIncludedFilter(PersistedString);
}
public bool CheckRuntimeRender(string isIncludedFilter)
{ bool result = audienceManager.CheckRuntimeRender(isIncludedFilter);
if (result) return result;
string[] targets = isIncludedFilter.Split(new string[] {";;" }, StringSplitOptions.None); if (targets.Length == 3)
{ string[] groups = targets[2].Split(new char[] {';'}, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries); foreach (string target in groups)
{ try
{ SPGroup group = SPContext.Current.Site.RootWeb.SiteGroups[target];
if (group.ContainsCurrentUser) return true;
}
catch (SPException)
{ }
}
}
return false;
}
}
}
