[Solved] User|GroupPicker for SharePoint 2010

[Norvin]

Hi.

I'm fairly new to both SharePoint 2010 and Silverlight, but now need to put together some UIs for creating/editing items in some complicated SharePoint 2010 lists. Many things are easy with the wonderful Silverlight tools from Telerik, but I'm unsure how to implement a control similar to the SharePoint PeoplePicker.

I also need to test somehow whether the current SharePoint user is member of an AD security group.

Any suggestions/help on either of these would be appreciated.
Thanks

[Miroslav]

Hello Norvin,

I am sorry for the delayed reply!

The people picked does not have hard to recreate UI but its functionality is a little bit harder to match. There are some articles about extending it:

http://sjoere.blogspot.com/2010/01/custom-peoplepicker-with-security.html

but most of them make use of it on the server side.

What you need is a web service that will return the information about users / groups in a consumable way (almost any web service will do).

It seems that you may need to use the AD web services which come with Win Server 2008 R2:

http://trycatch.be/blogs/roggenk/archive/2010/01/14/active-directory-web-services-adws-and-active-directory-management-gateway-service-admgs.aspx

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd391908(WS.10).aspx

Accessing them needs the client to be authenticated, which most probably means that the user should have authenticated before accessing the Silverlight application and the app should use the browser http stack (so it will not work in OOB). Looking at the service, it seems that it is aimed more at admins than users, so you should be careful about exposing it.

Another option is to build the web service yourself so that it will expose just enough data. This will be as simple as using RIA / WCF methods and querying the AD service on the server side about the information you need.

Regards,
Miroslav
the Telerik team