The concept of a Bookmark ID is prevalent throughout the Portcast platform, having impact on all aspects of your platform experience; from technical integration, to container and booking uploads, to customer billing.
It is important to understand what it is and how it is used inside the Portcast ecosystem.
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A "Bookmark ID" refers to a unique container identifier, generated within the Portcast platform, which can be used to identify an Ocean or Air Shipment.
In practical terms, this means that every time a Portcast user imports shipments into the platform, one or more Bookmark IDs can be generated, depending on the method of data upload and the container data that is generated consequently.
Bookmark IDs exist because they are unique in nature; whereas Container Numbers are not. Therefore, to be able to ensure reliable customer shipment detection, it is necessary to use an ID that can reliably be unique.
From a data format perspective, Bookmark IDs follow the UUID (Universal Unique Identifier) v4 standard, also known as Global Unique Identifier (GUID). It is a 128-bit, 32-digit string of numbers and hyphens in the following format:
f81d4fae-7dec-11d0-a765-00a0c91e6bf6
You will encounter Bookmark IDs in API responses, as well as in our Web App every time you access a single container or booking tracking page, like so: