Credentials, serialization and text highlighting using API.

Question

I am creating a SDL Trados plugin using the Integration API that is similar to the built-in MultiTerm plugin. I have a couple of questions regarding the SDL APIs: 
 
 Is there a way to store and retrieve user credentials using the built in credential store mechanism? When creating a Translation provider plugin a ITranslationProviderCredentialStore is made available through the ITranslationProviderFactory and ITranslationProviderWinFormsUI interface methods. Is something similar available through integration API (or any other API) as well. I can retrieve the project credentials using the Sdl.ProjectAutomation.FileBased FileBasedProject.Credentials property but i can't find a way to store my own (user) credentials there. 
 Is there a way to use the built in mechanism to serialize my plugin settings? I am looking for something similar to the Sdl.LanguagePlatform.TranslationMemoryApi ITranslationProvider.SerializeState() and ITranslationProvider. LoadState() methods. 
 Is there a way to mark or highlight some words in the source segment in editor view? The built in MultiTerm plugin is able to do this to mark terms in a source segment.

Romulus Crisan (former member) · Accepted Answer

1. Those credentials mechanism are available only at that specific level and you can't use them from the Integration API. You could use the Windows Credentials Store (Vault) or Windows Data Protection API 
 2. Studio is using implementations of SDL.Core.Settings so I could write your own implementations of ISettingsBundle, ISettingsGroup and then use SettingsUtil to serialize them. This is very generic mechanism and you need to write a a lot of code to implement it. If you are looking after something already built-in in Studio for storing specific plugin settings there is no such thing and you have to implement your own mechanism specific for your plugin 
 3. The only way the editor will highlight words in a source segment is by adding specific tags but the Integration API is not allowing any change on the source segments.

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Credentials, serialization and text highlighting using API.