Everything's working fine now, except for one final hurdle.

User Avatars are being generated and stored to disk in the appropriate Users folder. The Folders database is queried for a FolderID if the folder already exists, otherwise the AddFolder stored procedure is called to generate a FolderID.

The FolderID is used in calling the AddFile stored procedure to register the avatar file with the database and generate a FileID.

Finally, UpdateUserProfileProperty is called to update the user's Picture property with the FileID.

The final hurdle is that the new avatars are shown in the forum for users who have existing avatar images, but not for those who didn't previously have an image set (they were all reset when the forum was upgraded to use the Profile Picture instead of the old Forum Avatar). Now, I recall reading that a user just has to go to their forum settings to fix this (something just needs to be initialized with a visit to the settings page), but is there any way for my app to do this automatically?

Hi Mike, congratulations on working out the solution and thanks for posting your step by step findings, I'm sure it will prove useful to someone else.

---

Buy the new Professional DNN7: Open Source .NET CMS Platform book Amazon US

In that case, I'm talking about a bitwise or binary mathematical AND. In VB.NET it would be done with the expression (UserID AND 255). In C#, the expression would be (UserID & 255). Both expressions return an integer.

The expression takes the value of the lowest byte of the UserID, and is functionally equivalent to the expression (UserID Mod 256), which would also strip the UserID of anything above the lowest byte.

So, a UserID of 483, when run through the expression, would give you 227, since (483 & 255) = 227. Likewise, from the numbers in a previous post in this thread, (489 & 255) = 233, for a UserID of 489.You may notice that UserIDs that are below 256 would equal themselves, so a UserID of 19 would return 19 (or actually 019 for the directory folder, as it requires three digits).

The logic behind the naming convention for these folders, as far as I can gather, is a means of clustering the User's private folders so as to avoid limitations in the server's file system when a website with tens or hundreds of thousands of users tries to create tens or hundreds of thousands of subfolders in a single folder. Using this system, there are at most 256 folders as children of the portal's Users/ folder, and each of those child folders would have at most 100 children themselves. By clustering the subfolders like this, no single folder will have thousands of child folders, and the server is happy.