References

What are references?
References are relationships of dependency between items within configuration, for example, where a particular district references its immediate neighbours. There can be many thousands of references in configuration.
Xoom references
Xoom references must meet the following requirements (this is important when converting other XML representations of configuration to XoomXML).
When should I include dependencies in configuration retrieval?
In Xoom Console and Settings Migration Tool you can choose whether or not to include dependencies when retrieving configuration. Your decision will depend on the use-case.
What happens if I deploy items containing bad references?
References that cannot be resolved are called bad references. The effects of introducing bad references into a database are hard to predict: they will depend on the particularities of the managed system and the items involved.