Because of the distributed nature of the web, data content can be stored in different data repositories such as files and databases. The ImageGear ASP.NET services support the data provider model where any provider can be used to acquire or store data from a specific data store entity. The Image Data Provider Configuration can have more than one image data provider model defined with a default attribute selecting the implicit data provider to use when no provider is explicitly named. Each provider denoted in ImageGear.Web.DataProviders.ImageProvider section of the web.config file is named and it is that name which can be used by the web client application to pick a different image data provider rather than using the default provider.

To select a data provider, the provider name is combined with the document identifier name separated by a special character or string sequence and used wherever a document identifier is requested. For controls like PageView, there is a DocumentIdentifier property and for JavaScript code, there is the PageViewState class which has a documentIdentifier field. The default value separator is an “!” but can be changed to another string value but both the C# and JavaScript code pieces must be consistent in using the same token separator.