How plugin settings are saved?

To extend UI functionality you can use plugins. One of their marvelous feature is the ability to store data entered by admin or editor. As to myself I was in curiousity about where and how these data are saved.  So I’d like to save the values of two parameters somewhere in the button click handler:

    protected void btnSave_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)

         {

             DataSet dataSet = new DataSet();

             dataSet.Tables.Add(new DataTable());

             dataSet.Tables[0].Columns.Add(new DataColumn ("Parameter1", typeof(string)));

             dataSet.Tables[0].Columns.Add(new DataColumn("Parameter2", typeof(string)));

             DataRow dataRow = dataSet.Tables[0].NewRow();

             dataRow["Parameter1"] = HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(txtParameter1.Text);

             dataRow["Parameter2"] = HttpUtility.HtmlEncode(txtParameter2.Text);

             dataSet.Tables[0].Rows.Add(dataRow);

             PlugInSettings.Save(typeof(CustomAdminPlugin), dataSet);

         }

OK - With a help of .NET Reflector I dug into depth of

PlugInSettings.Save(typeof(MyAdminPlugin), data) call.

It applies for PlugInDB in EPiServer.DataAccess namespace – namely to its SaveSettings function:

public void SaveSettings(int plugin, string xml)

    {

      base.Execute(delegate {

        IDbCommand command = this.CreateCommand("netPlugInSaveSettings");

        command.Parameters.Add(this.CreateParameter("PlugInID", plugin));

        command.Parameters.Add(this.CreateParameter("Settings", xml));

        command.ExecuteNonQuery();

      });

    }

In my case plugin is equal to 141 and xml is

<NewDataSet>
  <Table1>
    <Parameter1>value 1</Parameter1>
    <Parameter2>value 2</Parameter2>
  </Table1>
</NewDataSet>

As you can see the working horse is the netPlugInSaveSettings stored procedure. Let’s look on it:

ALTER PROCEDURE [dbo].[netPlugInSaveSettings]

@PlugInID         INT,

@Settings         NTEXT

AS

BEGIN

      UPDATE tblPlugIn SET

            Settings    = @Settings,

            Saved       = GetDate()

      WHERE pkID = @PlugInID

END

Conclusion : plugin’s settings are saved in tblPlugIn table , namely in xml field. This is in consistency with SDK which says “PlugInSettings is used to store plug-in settings and information in a DataSet, these will be persisted as xml together will the plug-in definition in the EpiServer database.”