how to design extensible and secure data structure in my scenario?

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 issue I met with is how to design an extensible and secure data structure, in more details,

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? Currently I store each property into a database column, and each time I need a new property from requirement, I need to add column-- not very convenient.

2. How to make it secure 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

As I indicated in my other answer, the solution to your problem is: apply software engineering. This is what we do--there's no simple solution (e.g. use framework x or library y) to a broad question like this.