Identifiers (IDs)

In nevisIDM, most of the entities have two different IDs:

• The primary key of the entity in the database. The primary key uniquely identifies each individual DB entry. This technical identifier is only used for internal nevisIDM operations, that is, it is never shown on the web GUI, never referenced by the web services, and neither propagated to other systems. The name pattern of this identifier is <entity_name>_id", e.g., "profile_id.
• The identifier referenced as "extId" is the external identifier of an object. In contrast to the primary key, the external ID is the identifier shown in the web GUI, where it is also used as a URL parameter to point to the detail view of a certain entity. The external ID is also used as principal identifier in the web services of nevisIDM and it is, by default, the identifier used for propagation to other systems or applications. For example, the extId is propagated within the security token. External identifiers may be generated automatically or can be set manually on creation, depending on the setting of the client policy parameter gui.<entity_name>.extid.setmanually (see the chapter "Client policy"). Accepted characters in an extId are numbers, letters and the following characters: -@./_:()\{\}[]=!~+. However, we recommend using ASCII-only characters for external IDs to avoid integration issues caused by unsupported character sets.

info

In the nevisIDM web GUI, the external ID is simply labelled "ID". To avoid confusion, you can assume that you will only be working with the external ID. The primary key of an entity will usually not be exposed on the GUI, and thus only DB administrators will get in touch with it.