3 Guidelines and Best-Practice

Simple (Read: Limited)

The plugin is very simple, especially in an early version. The Smartionary domain does not support nested mapping, interpreting Lists, or complex datatypes. Therefore, it is limited to the very basic datatypes.

That being said, here is a little trick that might at least make nested mapping somewhat doable:

Smartionary.set(
    'computer.officeTerm1',
    'Specs of Office Terminal #1',
    cpu: 'Widget w12',
    'cpu.cores': 4,
    'cpu.speed': 2.2,
    memory: 4096,
    'memory.socket': 4,
    'memory.type': 'DDR3',
    'disk.1': 'OceanWall',
    'disk.1.capacity': 1099515288913 
    'disk.1.type': 'SSD',
    'disk.1.mounted': true,
    'disk.2.mounted': false
    smartionaryDescriptions: [
        'cpu.speed': 'GHz',
        'disk.1.capacity': 'In Bytes (~1 TB)',
        'disk.2.mounted': 'Unused'
    ]
)
Map computerInfo = Smartionary.get('computer.officeTerm1')
println computerInfo.'disk.1.capacity'

A bit cludgy, but doable if necessary.

List and nested mapping may be supported in later versions.

Normalizes

Anything goes in, but all that comes out are Strings. This is powerful, as it means that it automatically "normalizes" all of the data; at the same time it may be a bit tedious as there is no way to automatically convert that data back when getting.

Groovy has several String operations (such as isInteger() and toInteger()) that make converting this data back a little less painful.

Data is Volatile

The plugin cannot assume the type of environment that it will be used in. It can only try to make programming around it a little easier. However, there may be a case where data is accidentally altered or deleted from the Domains, which could break functionality.

That is not an issue with plugin, but rather the nature of the data management system that this plugin tries to convenience. The best that can be done (in any regard) is to either develope a solution that could become aware of and try to mitigate the effects of entirely breaking, or use Spring Core Security Plugin to make sure the web-interface is under supervision.

A nice idea is put information in the description that might indicate whether or not a certain piece of data is requried or important for key functionality, and how to go about handling its modification.

Use Descriptions

On the above note, use descriptions liberally. Descriptions can be done either by code or via the web-interface. It was made to hold as much data as possible, and supports readibility with newlines in both viewing and editing in the web-interface.

set() With Care; get() With Abandon

When setting, be wary of the values you are using. null is a perfectly valid value, and so do not commit the folly of trying to update just a description of a SmartionaryEntry progremmatically.

One of the plugin's advantages is that data can be altered during runtime without the need to restart. Therefore, it is against this advantage to design a solution such that you get only once. If that is the use-case, then there is no difference between the plugin and the grails-app/conf/Config.groovy file, or hard-coding that data.