What is the easiest way, without reinventing the wheel if possible, to obtain the Id of the most important role? Meaning that if a logged in user is a user, superuser and admin, how can I quickly get his most powerfull role id (in this case - admin)?

Failing that - how can I quickly and without messing with the membership system obtain a list of role ids?

I know how I can obtain the text list of roles, but making a roundtrip to SQL to obtain their ids seems to be a bit wasteful and so does performing inner joins on text columns...

This won't work for me. I don't only need to ascertain if the current user has admin rights, but also get a list of all his roles, with the admin ones being the most important. Anyway, I thought this would serve just right:

RoleController.GetUserRoles(int_portalId,int_userId);

but it just returns an empty list. Is there anything with similar functionality?