SharePoint get current user accountname?

ajax, javascript, sharepoint, sharepoint-2010, soap

Solution

For anyone else who stumbles across this, a year later I figured out how.

To your master page register SPSWC (if you're using Randy Drisgill's starter master it will already be there).

<%@ Register Tagprefix="SPSWC" Namespace="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal.WebControls" Assembly="Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal, Version=14.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=71e9bce111e9429c" %>

Then, before you want to access a property (eg: UserName) pull in the data

<SPSWC:ProfilePropertyLoader runat="server"/>

Next, access one of the properties, I would recommend using TitleMode to embed it in a `<script>` element.

<script>
  var username = '<SPSWC:ProfilePropertyValue PropertyName="UserName" TitleMode="true" runat="server"/>';
</script>

We now use it as shown in this PasteBin demo to populate a global with a few properties like first name, last name, user name, profile picture, status.

Problem

Does SharePoint 2010 store the current user's accountname somewhere in a globally accessible JS object? Every solution I can find involves some variation of an ajax web service call and this seems like an extremely heavy solution to access what should be a trivial piece of information. Things I can access easily: - Get current user id from `__spUserId` - Get current user name by scraping the html of the ribbon (eg: `$('#zz17_Menu').text()`) But neither of these is the accountname. Things I would rather not do: - Get current user info with a SOAP call to GetUserProfileByName - Get current user info by making an Ajax call for ../_layouts/userdisp.aspx

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