Hello,

I've raised this a number of times over the last few years and I think its time something was done about it ;)

My requirements: I need a way of selecting Users individually, and by Role or by Group.

If you use my Events module you'll know that I have a "Select User" screen that displays all the users (getting a bit slow of Smart-Thinker's 5000 users ;) and you can select them with a check box and invite them to an event. I also use this in my UserGroup module to invite members to join a group, and I plan to extend this to replicate MySpaces's Invite Friend functionality.

I'm sure there are lots of modules that require a User picker to return a list of users that can be used for their particular requirements. I'd love this to be a core control, but it's not looking likely and there are more important things for the core to concentrate on, so it looks like I'm going to have to roll my own, and I am looking for ideas and feedback to make this as useful to everyone as possible.

So - what would you like to see in a user picker? (I may make Add Role and Add Group separate pickers or as part of this - undecided still).

At the top of my list are privacy/security and scalability. The list will display DisplayNames only (you can click through and view the user's profile if you wish) and possible their UP photo (think MySpace).
It has to be paged and sortable using the database to do this so it only returns small chunks of data at a time so it is scaleable.

It has to have decent search funtionality - I plan to extract some of the ST UserProfile Directory search into this control so that you can search for users on DisplayName, UserName (and possible first/last etc - but this would be a later version and wrapped in settings as not many people want to expose this on a public site). You should be able to search by location, profiles with photos only, etc. I am thinking of a tag cloud on location and other fields.

End result of the search is a list (configurable size) of profiles with checkboxes. You can select these and it stores a list. You can either select more or click on finish to go back to where you were. This will save all the UserIDs in a list and pass it back to be consumed by whatever module is using it.

Questions to answer:
Should this be a standalone module that other modules can communicate with (to pass search params or return the selected user list)?
Or should it be a usercontrol to be consumed in modules (I am leaning towards this option) like the DNNLabel.

So - does anyone else have anything like this (no point in reinventing the wheel) - or do you have any suggestions or feedback? It has to be GENERIC so any control that manipulates user profiles can use it...

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Entrepreneur

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