You define the structure of the canonical documents to include a superset of all the fields that are required to keep data synchronized between the resources. For more information, see Defining the Structure of the Canonical Document.

One field that you must include in the structure of the canonical document is a key value called the canonical ID. The canonical ID uniquely identifies the object to which the canonical document refers. In other words, the canonical ID in a canonical document serves the same purpose that the native ID does for a native document from one of your resources.

For example, in a CRM system document, the native ID might be a Customer ID that uniquely identifies a customer’s account in the CRM system. Similarly, a document from the Billing system might use an Account ID for the native ID to uniquely identify an account. When the CRM system document or Billing system documents get mapped to a canonical document, the document must contain a canonical ID that uniquely identifies the object (customer or account).

Integration Server provides key cross-referencing to allow you to create and manage the values of canonical IDs and their mappings to native IDs. The key cross-referencing tools that Integration Server provides are:

For more information, see Key Cross-Referencing and the Cross-Reference Table.