Key-Value-Storage

The Key-Value-Storage is a storage component designed for portals to have a simple storage mechanism restricted to a specific portal node. The intention is to provide a storage abstraction for morphers to store intermediate object data. However, a regular portal may utilize the Key-Value-Storage as well.

Intention

The intended way to use the Key-Value-Storage is for a morpher to persist intermediate object data for later useage. The contract exposes a getter and a setter method and the and keys are unique for a portal node. A key can be any string of up to 255 characters.

A morpher's receiver could receive an object and store it in the Key-Value-Storage. The same morpher's emitter could later retrieve the object from the Key-Value-Storage and combine it with some other data. However, since a morpher is just a portal with a certain role to it, every regular portal may utilize the Key-Value-Storage as well.

Usage

Because the Key-Value-Storage is restricted to a portal node, it is contextual to a run. That is why it can be retrieved from the context of an explorer, an emitter or a receiver.

A portal can get or set any data to the Key-Value-Storage. Depending on the capabilities of the storage it is even possible to store files in it by wrapping the file contents in the corresponding struct class.

Error handling

In theory an implementation of the Key-Value-Storage should be able to handle any kind of data. In practise though, whether a certain set of data can be stored depends on the available storage strategies. Providing these strategies is the responsibility of the storage, so a portal cannot influence these. If a portal tries to store a value that cannot be handled by any available strategy, the Key-Value-Storage will throw an exception. Similarly, if a portal tried to read a value that cannot be handled by any strategy (maybe the corresponding denormalizer has been removed with a recent update), the Key-Value-Storage will throw an exception as well.