For a big customer we had to create about 80 different audiences, which should be deployed on multiple server (test, acceptance, production, etc.). Each audience have rules to describe if a user is part of the audience or not. Creating audiences is very easy, just provide a name and description. Rules however need some more attention.
Time to write a script for that! So, first of al, I searched the SDK for some more information about the way rules are used within the audiences. Basically you can add rules programatically like this:
using (SPSite site = new SPSite("http://servername"))
{
ServerContext context = ServerContext.GetContext(site);
AudienceManager AudMgr = new AudienceManager(context);
AudienceCollection ac = AudMgr.Audiences;
Audience a = null;
bool ruleListNotEmpty = false;
try
{
a = AudMgr.Audiences["John and Joe Connection"];
}
catch (AudienceArgumentException ex)
{
//your exception handling code here
}
ArrayList aRules = a.AudienceRules;
if (aRules == null)
{
aRules = new ArrayList();
}
else
{
ruleListNotEmpty = true;
}
try
{
//if the rule is not emply, start with a group operator 'AND' to append
if (ruleListNotEmpty)
{
aRules.Add(new AudienceRuleComponent(null, "AND", null));
}
AudienceRuleComponent r0 = new AudienceRuleComponent(null, "(", null);
aRules.Add(r0);
AudienceRuleComponent r1 = new AudienceRuleComponent("FirstName", "Contains", "John");
aRules.Add(r1);
AudienceRuleComponent r2 = new AudienceRuleComponent(null, "AND", null);
aRules.Add(r2);
AudienceRuleComponent r3 = new AudienceRuleComponent("WorkEmail", "Contains", "example.com");
aRules.Add(r3);
AudienceRuleComponent r4 = new AudienceRuleComponent(null, ")", null);
aRules.Add(r4);
AudienceRuleComponent r5 = new AudienceRuleComponent(null, "OR", null);
aRules.Add(r5);
AudienceRuleComponent r6 = new AudienceRuleComponent(null, "(", null);
aRules.Add(r6);
AudienceRuleComponent r7 = new AudienceRuleComponent("FirstName", "Contains", "Joe");
aRules.Add(r7);
AudienceRuleComponent r8 = new AudienceRuleComponent(null, "AND", null);
aRules.Add(r8);
AudienceRuleComponent r9 = new AudienceRuleComponent("WorkEmail", "Contains", "someexample.com");
aRules.Add(r9);
AudienceRuleComponent r10 = new AudienceRuleComponent(null, ")", null);
aRules.Add(r10);
a.AudienceRules = aRules;
a.Commit();
}
catch (AudienceException e)
{
//Your exception handling code here
}
}
}
Quite a flexible way to deal with rules. However, there are three parts that you have to deal with:
- LeftContent (AudienceRuleComponent.LeftContent Property), this is the part where the property is defined. In the example above, this is 'firstname' 'workemail'. etc. Not documented, for a 'member of' operator you need "DL".
- RuleOperator (AudienceRuleComponent.Operator Property), this is the operator, that could be 'contains' or '='. Again, not documented, for 'member of', this is 'Member of'.
- RightContent (AudienceRuleComponent.RightContent Property), this is the value, that can be the email address for example. Not documented, for a user it is the full AD path. for example: cn=SecurityGroup,ou=Groups,ou=AnotherGroup,dc=domain,dc=com
This way you can add change and construct audiences easily.