Getting a random user using UserProfileManager

Question

I am trying to create an Who’s Web Part for the SharePoint 2010 project I'm working on.

This web part should select a random user from the SharePoint profiles and display his / her name, department and phone.

The problem is that I could not find a way to get a random user directly from user profiles, which I would like to do.

I found a way to do this:

SPServiceContext myContext = SPServiceContext.GetContext(mySite); SPWeb myWeb = SPContext.Current.Web; UserProfileManager profileManager = new UserProfileManager(myContext); bool boolOut; SPPrincipalInfo[] userInfos = SPUtility.GetPrincipalsInGroup(myWeb, "AllUsers", profileManager.Count, out boolOut); Random random = new Random(); int randomUser = random.Next(0, userInfos.Length); SPPrincipalInfo user = userInfos[randomUser]; bool userFound = false; while(!userFound) { if (profileManager.UserExists(user.LoginName)) { UserProfile userProfile = profileManager.GetUserProfile(user.LoginName); userDepartment = Convert.ToString(userProfile[PropertyConstants.Department].Value); userPicture = Convert.ToString(UserProfile[PropertyConstants.PictureUrl].Value); userFound = true; } } 

Thus, I did this can be a problem, because the site will have 2k + users, so I would like to know if it is possible to do this directly from user profiles.

I'm new to SharePoint and it still confuses me a bit.

Thank you for your help.

Answer 1

I am curious why it needs to be a "random" user. I would suggest using OOB functionality around suggested peers, and your web part could expose this information.