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What is an Alias?

An alias is a user-provided name and an associated subset of properties of a component or reference. The provided properties are used to uniquely identify the entity either within a workspace or across all workspaces.

Important

Aliases must resolve to a single entity. If an alias can not be resolved or resolves to more than one entity, the batch request will fail.

Aliases can be introduced in a batch request using an aliases object, which contains two keys: components and references. Both keys hold dictionaries where the user-provided alias name is the key, and the value is a dictionary of fields that uniquely identify either a component or a reference, respectively.

{
  "aliases": {
    "components": {
      "my_alias1": {"rootWorkspace": "c253c98231776d0c8a54879e", "customFields": {"my_id": "X"}},
      "my_alias2": {"rootWorkspace": "c253c98231776d0c8a54879e", "name": "Component 1"},
      "my_alias3": {"componentKey": "WORK-1"}
    },
    "references": {
      "my_alias4": {"source": "my_alias1", "target": "my_alias2", "type": 2},
      "my_alias5": {"source": "my_alias2", "type": 2},
      "my_alias6": {"rootWorkspace": "c253c98231776d0c8a54879e", "customFields": {"some_id": "Y"}}
    }    
  }
}

Aliases are a powerful tool when integrating with external systems as they allow you to reference entities in Ardoq using a name or custom field value that is meaningful to your system.

An alias can be used in place of an Ardoq OID anywhere in the batch request that requires a component or reference identifier meaning that you can use aliases to identify components and references that you wish to update or delete as well as to identify components that are parents of another component or the source or target of references.