Data fields contain application-specific data that your application will set before publishing an event or will retrieve when processing a received event. Each field has a name and a specifically typed value. Event data field values are stored in a platform-independent representation that allows client applications executing on different hardware platforms and under different operating systems to easily exchange data without worrying about bit significance or byte ordering. The conversion from the webMethods Broker platform-independent data representation to the local data representation is handled transparently by the Broker get and set functions.