User Profile best practices

This article explains best practices for the User Profile.

Avoid empty dropdown list values

Dropdown fields can be used to filter items in other dropdown fields, e.g. only the cities of Denmark are shown when country Denmark is selected, instead of all cities. It is common use to Autoselect First Option on the filtered field, especially when the filtering leads to one unique item. Sometimes this is an empty value. Selecting an empty item value in a dropdown field in a User Profile means that other values of the selected data source item are not retrieved and therefor are not shown in the document or presentation.

Example

The example below describes the situation when an empty item value is selected.

In the data source below, the OfficeLocation column does not have a value for 'Berlin-1':

When this column is used in the User Profile, then the Address of 'Berlin-1' is not shown in the document or presentation. 

Setting in User Profile Selection in User Profile Result in document

To show the address of all cities, including 'Berlin-1', while allowing OfficeLocation to be empty, add a column to the data source and use that column in the User Profile dropdown field, e.g. Label:

Setting in User Profile Selection in User Profile Result in document