Why are there objects with the same ID in the vault?

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Depending on where an object has originated from, it may have one or more of the following types of IDs:

  • Internal ID
  • External ID
  • Original ID

The ID that is displayed on the metadata card of an object, on the other hand, is called the display ID and it can obtain the value of either the external ID, the original ID, or the internal ID.

Internal ID

Each object in the vault has an internal ID.

Internal ID is unique to each object per object type in a single vault. If the object is not imported from an external database or replicated from another vault, it has an internal ID only. When referring to an object in a vault, like for example in a script, you must refer to it by its internal ID.

External ID

Objects imported from an external database have an external ID, which is the ID the object is identified by in the external database.

Original ID

Objects replicated from another vault have an original ID, which is the ID that the object was given in the vault in which the object was originally created.

Display ID

Display ID is the identifier that is displayed on the metadata card of an object. The display ID obtains its value from one of the three aforementioned IDs in the following order of priority:

  1. External ID
  2. Original ID
  3. Internal ID

In other words, if an object has an external ID, it is displayed as the ID of the object on the metadata card.

If an object has an original ID, but no external ID, the original ID is displayed as the ID of the object on the metadata card.

If an object has no external or original ID, the internal ID is displayed as the ID of the object on the metadata card.

A Case of Similar IDs

The three aforementioned types of IDs may use the same values to identify different objects within a vault. An object in the vault may have an internal ID 100 while another object may have an external ID 100, and thus the displayed ID for the two objects may be the same. Therefore there may be objects in the vault with seemingly the same IDs.
Note: You may use the %INTERNALID% placeholder for a property of the Text data type to add the internal ID to the object metadata as an automatic property value. For detailed instructions, see Simple concatenation of properties and Specifying an Automatic Value for a Property.