Object IDs and AI agents

Every widget, page, report, node, knowledge-base page and skill in Ovidens - and every indicator, dimension, group, consistency check, reporting period, collection round and survey question - has an ID of its own, such as wdg_k3m9x2qd7f. Instead of describing where something is ("the Sales app, the fourth page, the table called Open orders"), copy its ID and give it to your AI. The AI reads exactly that object, in one step, without searching for it.

This works with any AI you have connected to your workspace - Claude, ChatGPT or another AI that speaks MCP (see Connect your own AI) - and with Vera in an analytic app.

What an ID looks like

An ID starts with a few letters that say what kind of object it is, then an underscore and ten letters and digits. It has no spaces and no hyphens, so a double-click selects all of it.

Where to copy an ID

• A widget: hover over the widget - in the app and in the editor - and a small ID icon appears right after its title. Click it to copy the ID. On a touch screen the icon is always shown.
• A page or a report: hover over its row in the app's sidebar. The ID icon appears among the row's other actions.
• The app: on the apps list, hover over the app and click Edit app (the pencil). The dialog shows an App ID row under the Technical ID, with its own copy button. This works for every app type. In an analytic app, the ID icon also sits next to the app's name in the header.
• A knowledge-base page: open the row's menu in the knowledge-base tree and choose Copy ID. An open page, and an open report, also show the ID icon next to their name.
• Everything else - a node, a skill, an indicator, a dimension, a group, a consistency check, a reporting period, a collection round and a survey question: its panel shows an ID row under the Technical ID (a group, which has no Technical ID, shows it under its name). The row is labelled with the kind, such as Node ID or Question ID, and has its own copy button.

An object gets its ID the moment it is saved. A reporting period that only exists in the timeline - nobody has renamed it, handed it over for review, approved it or started a round in it - gets its ID once it is saved for one of those reasons.

Copy link in the app header's menu and in the knowledge-base row menu copies a link instead. The link opens the object in Ovidens, and your AI accepts it just like an ID, because every link Ovidens copies carries the object's ID.

Hand an ID to your AI

Paste the ID into your AI with the word fetch in front of it:

fetch wdg_k3m9x2qd7f

Or use it in a question - "what does wdg_k3m9x2qd7f show for March?" - or paste a copied link. A connected AI hands the ID to Ovidens' fetch tool and gets the object back.

Two optional additions change what it reads:

A version and a page can be combined: fetch wdg_k3m9x2qd7f@published:p2.

What your AI gets back

• The object's name and a link that opens it in Ovidens. A widget's link opens its page, scrolls to the widget and highlights it for a moment.
• How it is set up - a widget's type, the node it reads, its columns and filters; a node's configuration and columns; a skill's instructions; a question's text and options.
• What it shows, as the app shows it - a table widget's rows with its filters, visible columns, grouping and totals applied; a chart's series; a pivot's cells; a Figure widget's value; the choices a Parameters widget offers; an SQL widget's result; a node's rows; a knowledge-base page's text; an indicator's collected values; a dimension's members. An AI widget answers with the skill it runs, and reading it never runs the skill.
• The IDs of related objects - the app, the page a widget sits on, the node it reads, the pages of an app - so your AI can fetch those next.
• Where each part came from - which version the setup was read from, and which calculation the data came from.

Which version your AI sees

Your AI sees what the app would show you: the setup from your open draft if there is one, otherwise from the published version, and the data from the latest successful calculation of the published version. So a widget you have just added to a draft comes back with its setup and a note that there is no published data for it yet. Add @published to read exactly what everyone else sees today.

Long answers

One answer holds up to 100 rows. When there are more, the answer says so and names the ID of the next page - for example wdg_k3m9x2qd7f:p2 - which your AI can fetch next. A long knowledge-base page is split into pages the same way.

IDs stay with the object

• An ID never changes while the object exists. Renaming it, moving a widget to another page, publishing, opening a new draft and restoring an older version all keep it.
• A copy of an app gets new IDs. Importing an app, installing one from the Marketplace, duplicating a survey and the sample apps all create objects with IDs of their own, so an ID always points at one object in one app.
• A deleted object's ID stops working. Your AI is told the object was deleted - or, if you removed it in your open draft, that it is still published.
• IDs belong to your workspace. An ID copied in another workspace is not found in yours.

Good to know

• Your AI reads by ID with your permissions and only reads - it changes nothing. An admin allows it with Fetch an object by ID in the Read group of the member's AI permissions. If your AI could already read an app's Visualisation configuration, it can fetch by ID too.
• Archived apps and the Audit Analytics app are not available to AI agents; their IDs are not found.
• Reading data by ID counts toward your workspace's compute credits, like any other question your AI asks of the data.