Save Formats

The picker property editors can be configured with a Save Format to determine how the selected items are stored:

CSV

"keyValue1, keyValue2, ..."

JSON

[
  { 
    'key' : 'keyValue1', 
    'label' : 'labelValue1'
  },
  { 
    'key' : 'keyValue2', 
    'label' : 'labelValue2'
  },
  ...
]

XML

<Picker>

  <Picked Key="keyValue1">
    <![CDATA[labelValue1]]>
  </Picked>

  <Picked Key="keyValue2">
    <![CDATA[labelValue2]]>
  </Picked>

  ...
</Picker>

When using the XML save format, the XML is saved into the Umbraco.config file as above (where only the label is in CDATA; normally Umbraco will store the full value of a data type into CDATA). This allows the for full XPath querying of picked items.

Relations

In addition to these save formats, there's also a Relations Only option where a local value is not stored, this causes the relations data to be become the primary data source.