The Active User Object (AUO) presents a convenient, unified set of user attributes across all data sources. The AUO can integrate data from one or more Membership Directories and from additional sources such as your pre-existing databases, creating a virtual user attribute schema that can be accessed from any script or program. An application can access the properties of the current user without having to worry about how to identify the user, where and how the user’s properties are stored, or whether the user’s properties need to be shared with another server or client.
The AUO and the scripts and programs that use it can read and write data sources and create user objects in them, subject to access restrictions that the data source may enforce.
You can configure the AUO to identify the current user with one of the following identifiers:
In Membership Authentication mode, the user account in the Membership Directory is identified either with a GUID (if Anonymous Cookie Authentication is enabled) or with a user name (for registered users).
In Windows NT Authentication mode, the user account in the Membership Directory is identified either with a GUID (if an AUO is configured to get the user ID from the cookie) or with a Windows NT account name (if an AUO is configured to get the user ID from the REMOTE_USER variable).
When your site uses Windows NT Authentication and a user visits the site for the first time, the AUO always creates a member object (user account) in the Membership Directory. The AUO does not set any attributes other than the primary identifier when creating a member object; if additional attributes are required by the data source, it is the responsibility of the script to set them.
When your site uses Membership Authentication, member objects are created by either the Membership filter (for cookie-identified accounts) or the Registration page (for registered accounts). The Registration page creates the account using AUO.
The AUO is an ActiveX object that is easy to use in your scripts and programs because it is always present once the author has instantiated it. The AUO is an ADS COM object, and all the properties within the AUO can be accessed using ADS methods.
The AUO is used by Rule Builder to provide user attributes for rule fragments.