For Membership, we say a user is on-line if the last date of activity falls within a configurable "online window".  As Xanderno points out, it's impossible to truly determine if a user is on-line.  At best, you can guess based on activity.

Thanks,
Mark

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

The behavior you're seeing is expected.  When you lookup up the profile for a user, we update that user's last activity date (LAD) which affects their "online" status for Membership. 

At some level, we have to make a decision on whether or not an operation is indicative of "user activity".  Looking up a user's profile data just happends to be one of those cases, but I can see that in an administrative environment where you're just pulling up the data, this doesn't make sense.  Except for an explosion in the number of API's, it would be nice to have overloads that allow you to skip updating a user's LAD.  We have such an overload for Membership.GetUser(...). 

I'll start an internal thread with the team to see if we should overload some of the API's in the next release.

Thanks,
Mark

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

Thanks for bringing up the issue.  We'll be reviewing this API and possibly all API's which update a user's Last Activity Date in a future release.

Mark

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

I have another problem : after running FormsAuthentication.SignOut()  I see that IsOnline for this member is still true. Why is that and how can I solve it?

Hello,

I'm pretty new in this forum...

I think that it might be a good work-around, just after you have used the getprofile/save etc to save a profile to use the Getuser, to change the LAD = lastlogindate and to save this into the membershipuser...

This really avoids to have the incorrect isOnline value.

Hope this helps...

Please feel free to let us know :-)

Regards

Pekestoemp

A little more detail on the fix identified above

A common scenario is to display read only user, profile, and role information in a grid to and administrator.  
Read only access to role information causes the LastActivityDate to be revised.  

A little more detail on the fix identified above

A common scenario is to display read only user, profile, and role information in a grid to and administrator.  
Read only access to role information causes the LastActivityDate to be revised.  

I just spent about 4 hours today trying to figure this one out!

What had me totally confused was that only some of my user's LastActivityDate fields were being updated when their profile properties were accessed, while others did not change.  I discovered that it is not just the "accessing" of the profile property that causes LastActivityDate to change (as stated above), but rather the accessing of a profile property that contains data. For instance I have a boolean profile property called "SendMeEmail".  If the property is not set the user's activity date was not changing when the profile property was read, but if the field was "true" then the activity date was updated. This may seem like an insignificant point, but it created what appeared to be inconsistent and confusing behavior.

Oddly enough the Profile.Save() method does not cause the LastActivityDate to change, so at least we don't have to waste additional SQL cycles when the profile is saved.

Thanks for your explanation and solution above!

Pekestoemp or any one else.
Can you show by code how you mean?

If you use Static methods to have this, then only one instance will execute at any given time anyway.

Ok, but is it the LastLoginDate that should be updated?

Ouch, I read this article from Peter Kellner regarding making two providers for membership to change password programatically, without the question and answer feature.
MembershipUser mu = Membership.Providers[?SqlMembershipProviderOther?].GetUser(username);

I thought I could do the same with profiles.
ProfileCommon p = Profile.Providers["AdminProfileProvider"].GetProfile(Request.QueryString["username"]);

But unfortunately I'm mistaken. Since I am using SQLTableProfileProvider as my profile provider, I tried to make (2) Profile providers on my web.config.

<add name="TableProfileProvider" type="Microsoft.Samples.SqlTableProfileProvider" connectionStringName="test" table="ProfileTableName" applicationName="Test"/>
<add name="AdminProfileProvider" type="Microsoft.Samples.SqlTableAdminProfileProvider" connectionStringName="test" table="ProfileTableName" applicationName="Test"/>

On Microsoft's SQLTableProfileProvider source code, they are calling UpdateLastActivityDate(conn, userId) when you extract or save the profile. So what I did was to remove this function call on my SQLTableAdminProfileProvider source code, so there will be no updates made to LastActivityDate. All was set but ProfileCommon p = Profile.Providers["AdminProfileProvider"].GetProfile(Request.QueryString["username"]); is not supported. Sigh :(.