Re: How to access context information inside a custom visual

 it appears that the powerbi.session.userInfo may not work: https://github.com/Microsoft/PowerBI-visuals/issues/412 I'll try this out later today.  Thanks for the tip.

Thanks  for those resources unfortunatelly it appears that custom visuals do not have access to DAX environment so I cannot use the HASONEVALUE solution.  

The visual I am writing actually uses this information (user, filters) to save data against an external DB.  We then retreive that information when the user has the same filter values.  So its not as simple as just a text field (sorry I was just using that as an example).