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    <p>I try to not keep data in any string based formats. But I encountered several situations, in which it was not possible to know in advance how the structure of the data will be (e.g. it was possible for the customer/end-user to dynamically add fields).</p> <p>In contrast to your approach, we decided to store the data in XML, e.g. in your case this would be something similar like this:</p> <pre><code>&lt;user id="1234"&gt; &lt;name&gt;Gina&lt;/name&gt; &lt;postion&gt;HouseMatriarch&lt;/position&gt; &lt;/user&gt; </code></pre> <p>This gives you the following advantages:</p> <ul> <li>The classes to work with the data (read/write) are already available in the framework (e.g. XmlDocument or XML serialization)</li> <li>you can easily exchange the data with other systems (if/when required)</li> <li>You can store the data in a file</li> <li>you can store the data in a database column (xml data type). You can even query that column when using SQL Server (although I'd try to avoid storing data in XML, that has to be queried)</li> <li>using XML allows to add additional fields to your data at any time</li> </ul> <p><strong>Update</strong>: I'm not sure why my answer was downvoted that much - maybe it is because of the bad example. Therefore I'd like to make it clear: I would not use XML for properties such as an ID/primary key of a user, or for standard properties like "name", "email", etc. But for "extended/dynamic" properties (as described above) I still think this is an easy and elegant solution.</p>
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    1. POC# Is holding data in a delimited string bad practice
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    1. COCan you please give a reason for the downvote?
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    2. CO+1 This should not have been downvoted. This is XML serialization!!
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    3. COThis is one of the best answers on the page - whomever is downvoting ought to comment on their reason. Martin is describing XML serialzation which is an excellent way of storing an object in string form.
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