---
title: SAIF.Presentation overview
summary: High-level purpose, scope, and responsibilities for this library.
status: draft
owner: SAIF Doc Gen
last_reviewed: 2026-08-17
library: SAIF.Presentation
reference_type: package
---

# SAIF.Presentation overview

> **Documentation context:** Packaged Component (NuGet)

`SAIF.Presentation` is a small VB.NET class library whose entire compiled surface is the `clsPreferences` user-preference store and its `PrefScope` enumeration. It wraps the `SAIF.Framework.Preferences` package with an application/page/web scope model and persists preferences as JSON through the SAIF BOF Oracle data layer.

## Purpose
- Provide a per-user, per-application preference store that consuming presentation components use to remember UI state (for example, saved Infragistics grid column order, widths, sort order, and size) across requests.
- Load all of a user's stored preferences eagerly on construction, expose scoped indexed read/write access at application, page, or web scope, and persist mutations back through `SAIF.Framework.Preferences.PreferenceData` when `Save()` is called.
- Consumed as a leaf dependency by `SAIF.Presentation.Web.Core.Infragistics111` and `SAIF.Presentation.Web.Controls.V2.Menu`, both of which read and mutate preferences through `clsPreferences` rather than accessing the underlying framework preference service directly.

## Responsibilities
- Own the `PrefScope` scope model (`AppLevel`, `PageLevel`, `WebLevel`) and the key-normalization rules (lower-casing) applied to every keyed operation.
- Derive the effective page name for page-scoped preferences, distinguishing web callers (from `HttpContext.Current.Request.Path`) from non-web callers (via `OverridePage` or a reflected call-stack type name).
- Serialize in-memory preference items to JSON and hand them to the framework preference service for persistence; this library issues no SQL of its own.

## Key components
- `clsPreferences`: the sole public type. Loads a user's preferences on construction, exposes `Item`, `Add`, `Remove`, `Clear`, `Delete`, `Count`, and `OverridePage`, and persists changes via `Save()`.
- `PrefScope`: a pure enumeration (`AppLevel`, `PageLevel`, `WebLevel`) with no behavior of its own; it parameterizes every lookup and mutator on `clsPreferences`.

## Related documentation
- [Index](index.md)
- [Architecture](architecture.md)
- [Dependencies](dependencies.md)
- [Operations and processes](operations-processes.md)
- [Business rules](business-rules.md)
- [Database tables](database-tables.md)
- [SQL catalog](sql/index.md)
- [API reference](api/index.md)

## Sources
- `SAIF.Presentation/clsPreferences.vb`
- `SAIF.Presentation/SAIF.Presentation.vbproj`