JFrog Artifactory: Difference between item, artifact, build and entry?

Question

I have a question regarding the AQL (Artifactory Query Language) used by JFrog Artifactory to find "things" in the artifactory. The AQL seems to be very powerful, but i'm wondering how to build (correct) search queries, using the correct terms.

The AQL documentation (https://www.jfrog.com/confluence/display/RTF/Artifactory+Query+Language) offers several object types. But what's the exact difference between an item, artifact, build and entry?

If i'm searching for a specific "file" (JAR) - is it an artifact, an item, or both?

Answer 1

Responding your last question, this is indeed an artifact. Every file in Artifactory is an artifact. With that being said, every artifact is an Item. Therefore use the item.artifact closer. :) Build is something a bit different, as Artifactory is a binary repository manager, it can connect and serve different build agents, such as Maven, Gradle, Nuget, PyPi etc... When using those clients in a CI server, that JFrog has plugin for (For example, Jenkins, Bamboo, TeamCityetc..) , it will produce a build info JSON that includes all of the information on your build. Also, the artifacts produced during this build will be associated to that build using properties. Long story short, you can use the 'build' closer in AQL to search for details in a specific build or to search for builds that contains specific data. Hope this was helpful :)