Metadata

[espenak]

For interaction with other systems, and with plugins, we will need to provide some way to store additional information in the system. I propose a system where each Node, Subject, Period, Delivery and DeliveryCandidate can have metadata.

I propose three types of metadata:

• BLOB (Binary data).
• String (Short string. Use BLOB for larger amounts of information).
• List of strings.

Each metadata associated with a Object (Node, Delivery...) should be accessible using unique keys (strings), which will typically be prefixed with the package name of the plugin. It will probably be useful to have a displayName in addition to the key, but it might also add an extra layer of complexity (displayName crashes..).

This should be quite simple to implement using JPA.