All objects which can be mentioned as a source or target in the CONNECT or LOGLINK tables have a unique key field. This field is for export-only and contains a combination of the table name and the object ID. This is necessary since the object ID by itself is often not sufficient to uniquely identify the object. For example, A1/F2 could be CHPID F2 of processor A1, or it could be port F2 of switch A1.
In the case of patchports and daisy-chained parallel interfaces, the source or target fields in the CONNECT table are qualified with a suffix indicating exactly which of the multiple interfaces is being referred to. (See discussion under the CONNECT Table). In these cases, a simple concatenation of the table name and the object ID is not sufficient to use as a key. Using the explicit unique key for database joins, and the source and target fields as the descriptive text, works well and is easy to describe to the database platform when using the tables exported by HCM.