DICE API Documentation/com.embabel.dice.provenance/ConnectorRef

ConnectorRef

data class ConnectorRef constructor(val connectorId: String, val externalId: String, val display: String? = null) : SourceLocator

A locator that references material owned by an external connector.

The connector (a private/product concern) knows how to resolve externalId within the system identified by connectorId. DICE only holds the identifiers needed to ask the connector for the material later.

Both ids are free text, so the key escapes the connector id (\ becomes \\, : becomes \:) to keep the boundary between the two segments unambiguous — otherwise ConnectorRef("a:b", "c") and ConnectorRef("a", "b:c") would both render connector:a:b:c and wrongly compare equal. The external id needs no escaping because it is the last segment. For any connector id without : or \ — every realistic one — the key is byte-identical to the pre-escaping rendering, so existing stored :Source nodes keep their keys. A stored key whose connector id did contain those characters was ambiguous when written and cannot be re-keyed from the key alone; re-ingesting the source is the fix.