By default, global items are identified by their names. This means that two items with the same name in two different tables will be treated as the same.
For example, if you create a role Sales manager in the table Manager roles and in the table Sales roles and if you link these two tables to the same project, their will be 2 Sales manager roles in the same project. If you then assign the role Sales manager from the table Manager roles to one task and the Sales manager from the table Sales roles to another task then you will get only one lane for Sales manager in the swimlane view and only one role value Sales manager in any report containing roles.
In this approach, we assume that there is a set of global roles identified by their names and the table mechanism is used to group them into some subsets that can contain common elements. The Manager roles subset may be used to specify the Process manager property whereas the Sales roles subset can be used for sales processes. The Sales manager is just a common element of these two subsets.
You may change this rule on the project level by checking Show table name in front of item names within the table checkbox in the Project settings. Then, two items with the same name in two different tables will be treated as different objects.
For example, you can create a table Financial representing a team with two roles Analyst and Controller and another table Economics representing another team also with two roles Analyst and Controller. In this case, we want to treat the financial Analyst as a role that is different from the economics Analyst role because they require different skills although they have the same name. In order to distinguish these roles we will prefix their names with the corresponding global table name, thus Financial.Analyst and Economics.Analyst.
In general, when you check the Show table name in front of item names within the table checkbox in the Project settings the following happens:
All global item names are prefixed with their table names in all places, except
the table content in the navigation tree (because the table name implies directly from the item's parent)
the process diagram (because there is not enough place for the prefixes there)
Swimlanes on global table names can be created for every type with a linked global table. The corresponding items will be added to the Swimlanes menu in the Layout tab (image left).
Below, you can see the difference between the Roles swimlanes and Roles tables swimlanes.The Task1 is assigned to the role Analyst from Economics table, the Task2 is assigned to the role with the same name but from Financial table, the Task3 is assigned to the role Controller also from Financial table. Thus, we have three different role lanes here. These role names are prefixed by the corresponding table name:
Since only two tables are used, we have two roles table lanes:
