Programmatic Identifiers

You will also need to decide on programmatic identifiers. These identifiers allow your filters and command handlers to uniquely identify individual business object instances.

In the List Manager you use a set of parameters to indicate your chosen programmatic identifiers:

AKey1, AKey2, AKey3, AKey4 and AKey5 specify (or receive) the alphanumeric values that identify a business object instance. They are optional and their maximum length is 32 characters (each).

NKey1, NKey2, NKey3, NKey4 and NKey5 specify (or receive) the numeric values that identify a business object instance. They are optional and their maximum precision is 15,0 (each).

So a business object instance can have up to ten programmatic identifiers, five alphanumeric and five numeric, in any combination. You might just use one or two identifiers, but you can also concatenate several pieces of information into a single AKeyn value, so effectively you can have many more keys than 10.

Here are some examples of how you might programmatically identify your business objects:

Business Object	AKey1	AKey2	AKey3	AKey4	AKey5	Nkey1	Nkey2	Nkey3	Nkey4	Nkey5
Product						Product Number
Customer	Customer Number
Account	Account Number					Company Number	Major Account	Minor Account
Department	Department Code
Section	Department Code	Section Code

Remember that these identifiers must uniquely identify an instance of the business object to your programs but that nobody is going to see them.