Concatenation of Properties: Using Placeholders versus Aliases

Question

Dear Forum, 
 When concatenating properties placeholders can be inserted manually or with aliases. 
 Are there specific situations in which manual OR aliases should or should not be used? 
 For example are they two different methods of achieving the exact same output? 
 Are there any specific benefits or drawbacks associated with using one over the other? 
 I have already read this --> https://www.m-files.com/user-guide/latest/eng/Automatic_values.html but I couldn't find a further explanation to the above questions. 
 Any advice would be great - thanks!

Joonas Linkola · Answer

Good question! The end result should be the same with both approaches (using IDs or using aliases), they are just different ways of referring to the vault element. I would say aliases are always preferable since then you can move the same configuration to other vaults which might have different IDs for the property definitions but the aliases would be the same. I cannot think of any situation straight away where IDs would be preferred but perhaps someone else can. 
 For a bit of historic background, it was only possible to use IDs in the placeholders until relatively recently but we added the alias option to make it easier to manage multi-vault environments. Cannot recall the version where this was added right now.

Concatenation of Properties: Using Placeholders versus Aliases

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