Using the SPPropertyBag with Custom Admin Pages in SharePoint

A couple of months ago, I started a MOSS 2007 project which was intended as a collaborative environment. In some cases, we wanted to read data from other data sources, one of them being a DB2 UDB, and display it in SharePoint. In order to successfully connect to a database you need a connection string, and you need to store it securely since it usually contains the required credentials to access the DB. In this post I will explain how we can use SharePoint’s SPPropertyBag to securely store strings of information and how we can use admin pages to interact with the data from within the SharePoint 2007 web interface.