While developing plugins, we may come across many scenarios where we need to store specific information about the plugins, be it configuration details or metadata for entities. How can we do this without creating a custom schema and going through the pain of editing entity definitions? In this recipe, we will learn how we can make use of JIRA's existing framework to store information specific to the plugins we develop.
JIRA uses the Open symphony PropertySet framework to store properties in the database. These properties are a set of key/value pairs and are stored against any entity that the user wants. The key of the property is always a String value; the value can be: String, Long, Date, Boolean, or Double. We have already seen how JIRA uses it in Chapter 2, Understanding the Plugin Framework. In this recipe, we will see how we can use PropertySet to store our custom data.