A uniform strategy for the general problem of providing custom editors and initialization strings for beans (all “dynabeans” inherit from a common bean class that incorporates this strategy. This is then extended to allow the initialization strings to be stored in a relational database. The database function is an extension of the function provided by the VisualAge Persistence Builder (using some of the EADP extensions). An important advantage of this approach is that many changes to the application can now be handled by adjusting the database version of the bean definition, without a need to touch the underlying code. This will reduce down time for the application, and also improve application stability.