Thanks for the info.   I don't have a real need to generate ids this way at the moment -- mostly I was just curious how it was done. I'd seen the parent link in navigator from an HDFS entity to its parent and figured you must be generating that functionally from other available info since the parent ID isn't part of the entity payload (later I realized the page could probably just be using a relation query to get it). Also, I was wondering whether I could create custom entities without using the java plugin.   I've been using the api as you suggest and for the most part I've found what I've needed between the docs, the sdk code, and a fair amount of experimentation.          ... View more