The purpose of the PluginData entity is to facilitate the passing of custom and/or site-specific data from the server to the client within the ZOGI transaction. PluginData entities may be passed to the client in either the PLUGINDATA key of a specific object or within the response to getObjectsById, getObjectsById, or searchForObjects requests.

The PluginData entities' only requirement is that it possess an "entityName" attribute of "PluginData" and a "pluginName" attribute which contains a string of greater than six characters in length. If the client receives this entity it should immediately hand it off to the application. Handling of PluginData entities is OPTIONAL, a client MAY ignore PluginData entities.

A zOGI client application presented with a PluginData entity should examine the "pluginName" attribute to determine if it can process/present the included information. If the application does not recognize the value of "pluginName" the PluginData entity MUST be discarded.

A PluginData entity does not contain an "objectId" attribute.

Any caching of of the PluginData payload should be handled by the specific application for which the data is intended. General purpose zOGI client libraries/wrappers should do nothing more then decode the data structure to an appropriate type (1) and hand it off to the client application.

(1) Such as System.Collections.Hashtable for .NET or an array for PHP.

See also: ApplicationAlert and UserAlert

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