Get Reference

Gets a single OCIReference

An OCIReference represents a relationship between an OCITag and an OCIArtifact.

When attempting to match a customer’s container image to a known OCIArtifact, we look up an OCITag that matches a particular digest. For mutable OCITags, that digest association, however, changes over time. Until OCIReference was introduced, we were only storing the first known digest for these mutable tags, which ended up introducing a lot of stale data into the digest classification process: the classifiers were not able to find OCITags that match newer digests for these mutable tags and therefore less accurate classifiers like ruleset and deduction classifier needed to try and classify the cluster inventory record.

For OCITags that are mutable — e.g. “latest” or “stable” or “v1” — there can be many digests that an OCITag has previously pointed to. Previously-referred digests for an OCITag are made available through the OCIReference object model. You may be wondering why we don’t have an References field on OCITag that just returns the digests that have been previously associated with this OCITag. The reason for that is because the list of previously-known digest associations can be very long (it’s unbounded) and so having this information in a separately-fetched object model that can be paginated/controlled seemed like a better design.