Monikers

When you access Valuemation API through scripts, you hold all the objects directly so there is no need for any additional unique and explicit identifier. But what if the users access Valuemation through a web client, which is in fact a mere text interface?

Moniker actually means a “nickname”. It is a technology, which allows you to transform each object to a unique string and vice versa (recreate an object from a string). It is a very important feature for the web technology – a user request to display a list of all catalogs results in generation of a HTML text page. Then, the users would like to follow the links in the catalog, which, however, are not held in a variable. In theory, you could include the order numbers of objects as identifiers, but in practice, this technique can never be used because of the multi-user feature - some user actions might make changes to the database in the meanwhile, which would change the order of the objects within the container and subsequent incorrect operation of the application. For this reason, monikers are essential to provide a unique identification of objects in such interfaces. Moniker is theoretically applicable not only for the web, because it is represented by a string, universal and easy to use. For example, you could use monikers to save bookmarks to a file.

To sum up, we can say that Valuemation API automatically names each object by the moniker (a string), which holds all necessary information, including the object type. Each moniker can then help you to return the original object from the database, no matter the changes affecting the object’s attributes, which might have been carried out in the meantime.