What's the best way to store data with a plugin?

Dev
1

I’m planning to store data with a plugin, of literally 1 value, a topic id. What’s the best way to do this?

Thanks.

2

If you only need to store a single Topic ID (like a configurable value), the simplest Discourse-native way is using a SiteSetting.
You also get a built-in admin UI automatically.

config/settings.yml:

plugins:
  my_plugin_enabled:
    default: true
    client: false

  my_plugin_topic_id:
    default: 0
    client: false
    type: topic      # gives you a topic selector in admin UI

In your Ruby plugin code:

topic_id = SiteSetting.my_plugin_topic_id
topic = Topic.find_by(id: topic_id)

If you prefer to store it programmatically (not exposed as a setting),
PluginStore is also fine for a single key-value:

store = PluginStore.new("my_plugin")
store.set("topic_id", some_topic_id)

topic_id = store.get("topic_id")
3 Likes
3

I think PluginStore is the most suitable way. A site setting will not fit this use case. Thanks!

1 Like
4

Your question reminded me of something I recently read on Meta.

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5

I was just about to start - thanks for bringing this up. It seems like making a whole DB table for 1 value is overkill, and completely unnecessary. Any ideas?

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6

What is the reason why you don’t want a site setting? It could be hidden so admins won’t see it, kind of like the IDs for the special topics in core, like TOS.

7

My use case is this: any topic or post created from the time the plugin is enabled is synced and stored somewhere else. But topics before that aren’t, so I have to run a job to sync those, perhaps in batches of 100. I need to store the lowest topic I’d so the next batch is that minus 100, and so on.

8

Chatbot does something very similar.

Here is the migration:

This only ever has one record :slight_smile:

2 Likes
9

That’s good - at least I’m not the only one :laughing:… my next hurdle is how to run the migration - in a dev Discourse site or something else… wouldn’t running the migration then just add to Discourse’s migrations directory? Should I copy the file manually? Thanks.

10

You place it, as per all plugin migrations, in the plugin (just like Chatbot above).

You run migrations with LOAD_PLUGINS=1 rake db:migrate

Read up on migrations here:

2 Likes
11

I know, the only thing I don’t get is that I’m supposed to write the minute and second manually as I create the file?

12

Read the guide. Not convinced you’ve read it past section 1. :wink:

1 Like