Instrument PIDs not configurable

[cchndl]

I am a bit confused regarding the PIDs and instruments.
As far as I understand, the PID for each instrument should point to somewhere like a publication describing the instrument. Or at least something that does not change over scicat instances.
For example in these two cases:

• two catalogues with the same instruments would have different PIDs
• When we set up a new instance all the pids would change, wouldn't they? On data loss etc.

Right now, when I create a new instrument over the REST API, the fields id, _id, and pid all contain the same value. That there is an internal id is obvious, but shouldn't the pid be controllable?

Is there a possibility of configuring it that I am missing, or am I misunderstanding that field entirely?

Thanks in advance!

• cchndl

[sbliven]

We don't use instruments at our facility, but looking over the schema it looks like uniqueName could be used to identify an instrument across multiple scicat instances.

id and _id are always the same and are the mongodb document identifier. For datasets the PID can be different (it is assignable by users in CREATE_DATASET_WITH_PID_GROUPS). It looks like we never had a request for custom instrument pids.