The hierarchical data is stored in XML files. It is expected that further backends will be added in the future. As mentioned above, configuration elements have to be specified in a configuration schema. The configuration schema describes a hierarchical data structure. It offers several kinds of elements, some of which serve to combine related elements into logical groupings, while others hold the actual data.
Elements have a well-defined Type .
A Type may be described in the schema as a separate named entity, called Template , or it may be implicit in the definition of an element. Templates allow reusing a type in multiple places in a schema and dynamic creation of elements of a given type. Values must have one of a number of supported data types. The configuration service may not handle large BLOBs efficiently. If it is nullable it may assume the special value NULL , which indicates the absence of any particular value.