Property bags and Variant Types

When using script based monitors the name value pairs get returned in what is called a propert bag. A property bag is simply a blob of XML that looks like this:


<DataItem type="System.PropertyBagData" time="2007-07-16T23:10:53.1294962+01:00" sourceHealthServiceId="8FD1B472-1464-691B-9BF7-E3AC669C2310">
<Property Name="scan.dat" VariantType="3">19</Property>
<Property Name="names.dat" VariantType="3">19</Property>
<Property Name="clean.dat" VariantType="3">19</Property>
</DataItem>

The XML describes that this is a property bag, that date/time that it was submitted to the management server and the properties contained in the property bag.

The VariantType describes the type of the value that is returned. The variant types are:

Empty = 0
Null = 1
Short = 2
Integer = 3
Single = 4
Double = 5
Currency = 6
Date = 7
String = 8
Object = 9
Error = 10
Boolean = 11
Variant = 12
DataObject = 13
Decimal = 14
Byte = 15
Char = 16
Long = 17