#ProfileService

[saviant-blog]

Resolving NullReferenceException with ClientApplicationServices / ProfileService

If you have been (or trying to) work with Client Application Services, you may have chased this issue like I did this morning.

The Setup You are working with Client Application Services, specifically the Profile Service.  You have either added a new profile property or you are just trying to get synched up for the first time. You select Load Web Settings, you enter a valid username/password, it waits for a second and then you get this....

The Solution The real culprit, in my opinnion, is a bug in the profile service which should at least fail a bit more gracefully.  You can resolve the error by updating (or adding) the following configuration section to your web.config ... 

System.Web.Extensions/Scripting/webServices/profileService

Upon further inspection...

By default, no profile properties are available. To make a profile property available to a client application, add the property name to the readAccessProperties attribute of the profileService element. To enable a client application to update a profile property value, add the property name to the writeAccessProperties attribute.

So, armed with knowledge we can now add a coma delimited list of properties in the readAccessProperties attribute of the profileService configuration entry. 

<profileService enabled="true" readAccessProperties="FirstName,LastName,EmailAddress" />