user profile definition issue

Question

Hello everyone,

I am developing a web site and I need to build a data structure to store user profile information. Just like what we filled about our gender/age/education/etc. information for Facebook, etc.

The current issues I met with are,

1. Currently I may not consider all required user profile information from current design/development phase, how to design a extensible framework so that in the future I could extend user profile esaily? Are there any mature (open source) user profile framework to reference?
2. Are there any standards about what are the standard items we need to collect in user profile?
3. How to make it secure/flexible to share user profile information for different applications? For example, app1 just need a part of user profile, and for security reason I only need to expose a part of user profile to app1. But we need to make it flexible enough so that when app1 needs additional user profile items, we could easily expose more.

Solution in C# or in programming language neutral are appreciated. :-)

thanks in advance, George

Answer 1

There's nothing special about user profiles. What you are asking for applies to nearly every app I've ever worked on: store and share data.

Different platforms are better at different things but there's no silver bullet for this problem--this is what software is all about.

For example, you can create a users table in a database and some CRUD screens to manage it. You could create an API into that data using any number of approaches.

When your requirements change, repeat (and hope you don't have to change too much).