When developing apps, you will likely need to store some metadata. This can either be specific to a certain user or be shared among all users.
Data objects offer an easy way of managing metadata either on the product, license key or machine code level. They are quite useful since it’s easy to change them as your application evolves and user-specific data will stay the same across all devices.
In this article, we will cover data objects associated with a product.
Editing metadata
To add or edit data objects on the product level, you can click on the Data Objects link as shown below:
On the next page, you can either add or edit existing data objects. The names are case-sensitive and duplicates are not allowed.
Retrieving metadata on app start
Let’s assume our application needs to obtain the currently supported DOTNET_RUNTIME (which we defined in the previous step). This can be accomplished with the code below (the project files are available here).
To get it up and running, we need to specify an access token and modify the ReferencerId. The access token needs to have the “ListDataObjects” permission checked and we also strongly recommend to specify the product it should work with. The ReferencerId should be the Id of the product.
var systemSettings = Data.ListDataObjects("access token", new ListDataObjectsModel
{
ReferencerType = DataObjectType.Product,
ReferencerId = 3349, // <- the product id
});
if(!Helpers.IsSuccessful(systemSettings) || systemSettings.DataObjects == null)
{
Console.WriteLine("Could not retrieve the settings.");
}
var settings = systemSettings.DataObjects.ToDictionary(x=> x.Name, x => x);
if(settings.ContainsKey("DOTNET_RUNTIME"))
Console.WriteLine(settings["DOTNET_RUNTIME"].StringValue);What’s next?
In the future tutorials we will describe how you can store user specific information. In meantime, let us know if you have any questions 👍