One of the things I came across when prepping for my Jakarta blog post was that we've released a new field type called Name-Value Pairs. Intrigued by the name I looked into it and found this description from the field types article on the docs site:

Field that maps text values. Each mapping is one-to-one, however a single Name-Value Pairs field can contain multiple mappings. Each mapping must use a unique name, and the name cannot be empty.

From here I fired up a dev instance and created a scoped app (that's just how I roll), created a new table called Data, and added a name-value pair field called Data values. This is what the default record looks like:

Adding values is very straightforward.

It's nice to be able to store data like this, but I think the real value comes in when you start working with it from a script. For example, here is a script I can run against the record created above.

//grab the gliderecord object for the record in the screenshot

var gr = new GlideRecord('x_85636_name_value_data');

if (gr.get('a49e63a56f110300d8c252b10b3ee41e')) {

      //iterate over the current properties in the data values field and print the values

      for (var name in gr.data_values) {

              gs.info(name + " = " + gr.data_values[name]);

      }

      //add another property to the data values field

      gs.info("Adding a height property")

      gr.data_values.height = '50';

      gr.update();

      //iterate over the current properties in the data values field and print the values

      for (var name in gr.data_values) {

              gs.info(name + " = " + gr.data_values[name]);

      }

}

Here are the printed values:

x_85636_name_value: color = Blue

x_85636_name_value: length = 27

x_85636_name_value: width = 10

x_85636_name_value: Adding a height property

x_85636_name_value: color = Blue

x_85636_name_value: length = 27

x_85636_name_value: width = 10

x_85636_name_value: height = 50

And this is what the record looks like after I've added the height property to the field from the script:

The docs article points out that this field type would be useful for holding header information for a web service request where the name of each mapping is the header such as Content-Type and the value is the header value, such as Application/json. I would expect that there are a lot of other good use cases out there for this type of field, where you need to store some data that is less structured and you don't want to create a field for every possible option.

If you can think of a use case where this field type could help, please share it in the comments below.