Any object managed in a Rational Synergy database is uniquely identified by the following properties: name, version, type, and instance.
By default, the four-part name (also called the object spec or full name) is written as:
The following are some examples of four-part names: main.c-3:csrc:2 and draw.c-beta:csrc:7
An object name can be any combination of characters, except for restricted characters. The type can be any of the default types (for example, csrc, ascii, and so on.), or any type you created. You can designate the name, version, and type, but Rational Synergy calculates the instance.
The instance is used to distinguish between multiple objects with the same name and type, but that are not versions of each other. For example, a project could contain 20 different makefiles, each named makefile, each in different directories, and each with many versions. If you want to use makefile-4, a query of that object might yield six objects called makefile-4. In this case, the instance property distinguishes which makefile object you want to use. The value of the instance is normally numeric, but can be alphanumeric in some cases, such as in a database that uses DCM.
You can use a specific object version in multiple directories. You can reference an object version through its path name. However, while the file location might change, the four-part name unique ID always remains the same.