Place to store user settings in Sharepoint besides profiles

Question

Is user profiles an appropriate place to store things like number of items per page in a custom grid user selected? (I you can store it in the view, but it won't be per user this way).

My first though was to store these settings in user profiles, but there are problems with access permissions for programmatically creating user profile properties boiling down to you either have to give every user 'Manager User Profiles' permission in SSP or you have to run the application pool under a domain user, not NETWORK SERVICE. Both scenarios are unrealistic for me, so I'm now looking for another way to store such 'per user' settings.

Thanks!

Edit: I'm now considering ASP.NET profile mechanism with an additional DB to store user properties.

Answer 1

Maybe a Global List, that is only accessible for the SHAREPOINT\SYSTEM User and that you can then Query in a SPSecurity.RunWithElevatedPrivileges Function.

Disadvantage: You require Custom code to read/write to that list.

Answer 2

Cookie?

Sure they have limitations, but it is fairly easy to create the control to run javascript to add/edit the value

Answer 3

Given that the information is not sensitive a simple database with values stored against AD login should suffice.

And as you have the ASP.Net user database already, storing the information there would be the best option.