Business object identifiers

The Kekker API works with abstract business-objects, related files, operation queues, and events. It is important to use correct identifiers in API calls to uniquely identify a specific instance of business-object.

There are two types of identifiers in Kekker:

• Local identifier - uniquely identifies a business-object within the current Node
• Unique Platform Identifier - uniquely identifies business-object within any node of a network, or a cluster of networks.

They are equally important and are used identically.

The Identifiers features

Local Identifier

A local identifier uniquely identifies a specific instance of business-object in the current node.

Local identifier is assigned when a business object is created, and your app gets it as an operation response. In addition, a local identifier is set to business-objects from other nodes on their first appearance in the current node. Within different nodes one business-object has different local identifiers.

Roughly speaking, the local identifier is the primary key of an object record in the corresponding Adapter table for a given Node. The local identifier looks like this - 01234567 - a fairly short number sequence.

Unique Platform Identifier

A unique platform identifier (UPI) uniquely identifies an instance of business-object within all nodes of the network. UPI is assigned when the business-object is successfully created.

Node-creator can get a UPI by requesting the result of “Create” operation (see “Interacting with Operation Queues”). Unlike a local identifier, a platform-unique identifier is propagated across hosts along with a business object.

UPI looks like e3b45e60471e4ba18887bac2b49110d4:7dfdaf0d6d8241eeb155d88f88db2012 - it consists of two 32-bit hexadecimal numbers connected by a separator.

Why are there two types of identifiers?

It takes some time to obtain a UPI identifier. You can get a local identifier immediately after business object creation and continue working with it right away.

Where the local identifier is not used?

As noted above, both types of identifiers are absolutely equivalent in API operations within a particular node.

If you want to send a link to another business object in the data files, you have to use only UPI (for example, if you want to refer to an insurance deal in a guarantee deal)