gunner - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 6:26 AM:
Hello,
I've been exploring various table fields and came across the CONFIG_ID field which is one of the key fields used by ARAS. I have come to the understanding that it uses the MD5 algorithim to determine the text in this field. However, does anyone know what field(s) it derives the CONFIG_ID value from?
I know we could use anything we like for MD5, and you could say it is pretty much random generated. But I'm guessing there should be some sequence ARAS follows i.e. for example it uses the EFFECTIVE_DATE + GENERATION fields to get the value etc..
Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks....
PeterSchroer - Wednesday, October 26, 2011 7:54 AM:
Hi Gunner, the truth is much simpler than you expect. Simple = Elegant in my book.
Every instance of an Item is assigned an "id" which is a 32 character GUID which uniquely identifies the instance of the item (one rev of a Part for example). For versionable Items, we need a way to link together as a set all the versions of that Item. This is the config_id (configuration id). Very simple logic. When the generation =1 first instance of the Item is created, we copy the assigned ID to the Config_id property. The next generation gets a new "id" to uniqely identify it, but shares the same config_id as the predecesser.
In a sense, ID = Config_ID + Generation, but we don't bother with concatenating key strings.... Config_id is just the ID of the first of the series (set).
--peter