Impersonate User: Mimic another user similar to the Default Profile

Question

I'm looking for a way as an Administrator to impersonate another user similar to the way you can login to the portal using the Default Profiles.
Example: I select a user to impersonate and then click a button. I'm then in the portal as that user.
There may be a problem opening documents, etc, but I'm more interested in making sure that I see the content that the other person is seeing.
It would be a great help to diagnose security problems such as "Why can't I see this portlet, etc."
One solution I thought of was to switch ID's in the PTUSERS table. This solution wouldnt' want to go any further than dev though. I don't really like this solution because if you forget to switch them back or they are in the portal when you switch them......there's a problem.

Answer 1

I think that changing the PTUsers table is unlikely to do what you want. It's likely to break the system because there are a number of other tables that contain data about users, and you have not changed those tables. Additionally, information may be cached in memory, so changing the tables would not change that information.
I think that there is a significantly easier way to do this, though it may still not be easy. The IPTSession interface supports a function called ImpersonateUser. If you are logged into the Portal as an Administrator, you can call ImpersonateUser to switch your session over to that of another user- from then on, the Server will treat you as the second user.
This is a very easy call to make, but it's only half the story- the UI also has to know to treat you as the new user (e.g. use the correct language settings, flush cached session info, etc.) This is basically like doing a login. I don't know the details of how this would be done (a discussion forum about UI customization would be more useful here), but I could imagine doing something like copying the login screen logic to a second, "hidden" login screen which takes in a username, but no password. The page would only operate if you were already logged in as an Administrator, but it would perform the "standard" login logic, except that it would do Session.ImpersonateUser on the pre-existing session instead of creating a new session and logging in as the new user.