Retrieve and Manage User Profile Properties in SharePoint 2010

I am writing a custom webpart that will output user profile information from SharePoint 2010. My code requires me to get quite a few fields. Most of these fields are not “intellisensable” and cannot be accessed directly without having to manually enter the field name, as you can see from my code snippet below.

But its really easy to get the user field properties incorrect. A good example, is retrieving the office location. You would think the property name would be called “OfficeLocation” but its actually called “SPS-Location”.

Luckily SharePoint allows us to view and access all the user profile properties we require and even create our own custom fields.

Lets start by opening Central Administration and navigate to Manage Service Applications > User Profile Service Application, which will take you to the following page:

Click on “Manage User Properties” to view a list of all user field properties SharePoint uses. To either rename the display name or view the actual property name, click on a field and press “Edit”.

The “Name” field (as highlighted below) is not editable and for a very good reason too! These are the property ID’s that we will call when wanting to retrieve their value. All default field names are not editable.

As I stated earlier, you can create your own properties and call them whatever you want. But SharePoint already provides us with so many out-of-the-box, you probably won’t need to create anymore anytime soon.