Overview
M-Files vault connection settings include a setting called ID. This article explains what the ID is used for.Solution
The ID is used on operating systems where the old, short 8.3 file names are in use. If a vault connection's name exceeds eight characters on such a system, then the ID is used to display the vault's name on the M drive.For example, let's say you have vault connections with the following IDs: 1, 5, 5 (duplicate!), and 456. If you access the M drive on a computer where 8.3 file names are used, the vaults would be displayed as follows:
000001~U
000005~U
000005~U
000456~U
When you create a new vault connection on your computer, M-Files assigns an ID to the vault connection automatically, starting from 1 and then incrementing by 1 for each subsequently added connection. However, if you are distributing vault connection settings in a centralized manner, then you may end up pushing such IDs to client computers that are already in use on some of the clients.
In general, you should use unique values for vault connection IDs to avoid confusing situations, like having two or more vault connections with the exact same name, like the two vaults called 000005~U in the example above. However, in practice it is very unlikely that your operating system would use the 8.3 naming convention in this day and age.
If you are distributing vault connections via GPO or some other centralized management system, and you want to make sure that you are not pushing IDs that are already used on some clients, you can set the IDs to such a high range (4–6-digit numbers), that it is very unlikely that any user would have built that many connections on their computer manually.
