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Oracle CRM On Demand User Keys

A user key is a field or group of fields that uniquely identifies a record. Generally, a subset of the record's fields are used as a user key. However, one field on its own can act as a user key, depending on whether the field can identify the record as unique. Each user key can be used independently to identify a record.

The most basic user key is the single field ObjectId; for example, for the user object the UserId field is a user key. Every record in the database has at least the following independent user keys:

• ObjectId
• ExternalSystemId.

In addition, there are various field combinations for different objects that can also be used to define uniqueness.

It is only possible to query for or update a particular record in a table if the values of all the fields in any user key are known. In some instances, the ObjectId or ExternalSystemId of a record might not be known, but the values for some other user key might be known, in which case the record can be successfully queried or updated using that user key. For example, for a Note child object, the Subject and Description fields form a user key, because they can be used in conjunction with each other to determine whether the record is unique or not. Such a combination is not guaranteed to provide complete uniqueness, but it can be used to query for uniqueness.

The user keys for each object are detailed for each object in Core Parent Objects (Web Services v1.0), and Core Parent Objects (Web Services v2.0).