ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming Problem - Design - Solution

7.2. Design

The first thing we need to think about is how we will store the subscription data, such as the user's e-mail address, first and last names, and other information that can be used to personalize the newsletters. In the previous edition of the book, I created a new database table to store this information, and wrote code to retrieve it, save it, and modify it. This time around, things are much easier because of the rich support provided by the membership and profiling system we already developed in Chapter 4. As you may recall, the membership data includes the username and e-mail address, while the profile includes, among other things, the user's first and last name and the format of newsletter she would like to subscribe to (plain-text format, HTML format, or no newsletter at all). To make things simpler and prevent storing the same data in multiple places, we'll use those same fields. You may think that this would require the user to register for the site just to receive the newsletter, and this is not required by many other sites, so this may be a bad idea. Yes, it will require users to register for the site, but the only information strictly required by the registration system is just the username, e-mail address, and password; all the other profile information is optional. For that reason, I don't think that requiring users to choose a username and password, in addition to an e-mail address (needed anyway to send the newsletter), is much of a problem, or a valid ...