Sharepoint PeopleEditor: How to find out what kind

Question

I have a PeopleEditor:

<SharePoint:PeopleEditor ID="peopleEdit" ... SelectionSet="User,DL,SecGroup,SPGroup" />

It works flawlessly on the page, i.e. I can select AD users, Sharepoint groups and anything I would like.

The problem is that I can't find a property on the PeopleEditor of what kind of user/group is returned. Let's take the following example:

//User: John Doe - mycompany\jondoe  is at position 0
//Sharepoint group: "All Site Users" is at position 1

PickerEntity pickerEntity1 = (PickerEntity).peopleEdit.ResolvedEntities[1];
// pickerEntity1.Key = "All Site Users"
// pickerEntity1.Claim = null
// pickerEntity1.DisplayText = "All Site Users"
PickerEntity pickerEntity0 = (PickerEntity).peopleEdit.ResolvedEntities[0];
// pickerEntity1.Key = "mycompany\jondoe"
// pickerEntity1.Claim = null
// pickerEntity1.DisplayText = "Doe, John"

I can do some "hackish" things like trying to cast the returned string [sic] value as a User or as a Group and do some kind of Exception based program flow (if user exists do this, else if group exist etc.), but I wouldn't consider that clean code.

Is there a better method of choosing people/groups in Sharepoint or a better method to work with the PeopleEditor?

Answer 1

Use the PrincipalType value from the EntityData hashtable:

string principalType = pickerEntity1.EntityData["PrincipalType"].ToString();

I don't remember all possible values but User and SharePointGroup are definitely among them.

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moontear's comment:

To list all information this entity has, the EntityDataElements array is helpful. For SPGroup this contains SPGroupID, AccountName, PrincipalType.

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Janis Veinbergs's comment:

It could be that it contains values from Microsoft.SharePoint.Utilities.SPPrincipalType enum but i haven't tested it.

Here you go:

[Flags]
public enum SPPrincipalType
{
    None = , 
    User = 1,
    DistributionList = 2,
    SecurityGroup = 4,
    SharePointGroup = 8,
    All = SharePointGroup | SecurityGroup | DistributionList | User, 
}