Content highlight: Refs vs. IDs in the Fluent Platform

Both IDs and Refs are identifiers made available by the Fluent platform. IDs are internal, and Refs are typically passed in by third-party integrations. The article below has been released to outline the recommended practices and nuances for using these fields in your projects.

The Key Points to consider when utilizing IDs and Refs in the platform are:

• IDs are generated by the Fluent platform and are guaranteed to be unique at the time of creation. 
• Refs are typically values passed in via third-party integrations and should represent the IDs from external systems.
• Despite the system not enforcing the uniqueness of refs, it is highly recommended that all entities have unique refs. Every ref should be unique within its nearest container; for example, Retailer refs need to be unique across all. Catalogue or Account.
• If your refs are not unique, some APIs will not work as expected. This means that our reference modules may not work as expected as well if you set refs to non-unique values.

For more details, check out the Understanding IDs and Refs in GraphQL article.