Sharepoint custom personalization

Question

I am creating sharepoint custom solution that will show number of drop down in page. The drop down data is shared in may pages.

I want to persist selected values of the user such that when ever he visit that page or any other page that have same drop down, he should be able to see is saved value pre selected in drop down.

To implement this I have a number of options. Please suggest the best for SharePoint 1)Sharepoint User profiles 2)Sharepoint list 3) Cookie 4) Isolated storage?

Options 3 and 4 here are clientside. But I am looking for any other way that SharePoint provides to save user preferences/personalization information.

Which one is the correct way of doing that in SharePoint? Thanks

Answer 1

One issue you should be aware of with user profiles is that they are only available for MOSS (as opposed to WSS). In WSS each site has their own User information list. If the solution you are building will need to run in both MOSS and WSS environments, you should plan accordingly.

jt

Answer 2

My instinct tells me to use cookies for this, if it's a fairly simple state you need to persist. This seems to be a part of the UI logic, and I wouldn't bind that to the profile storage.

Pages and web parts have personalization stores as well, but they are generally not shared between instances.

Answer 3

I would go with profile storage, because that's the sort of thing it's there for, although generally when you are writing custom code in SharePoint the idea of best practices kind of gets thrown out the window.