Background

A resource reference is where an element refers to another element either in the same file or another model/file. An example of this is the type of an attribute/parameter or relationship e.g. association/index.

In Rational Rose references were resolved through a two stage look-up process;

1. Firstly the qualified name of the reference was used to find the element;
2. Where the element could not determined by qualified name, the id of the element was used.

If the element still could not be found the element reference was considered as broken and needed to be manually resolved by the model owner.