The alias field on an AnalyteAlias stores the verbatim text a lab uses in its data files. Case and spacing matter: if a lab report contains "Trichloroethene" while the canonical Analyte name is "Trichloroethylene", you create an alias with that exact string. During import, piper performs a case-insensitive lookup of incoming analyte names against alias values to find a match before flagging an UnrecognizedAnalyte issue.
Technical section
Data model, API, and internals — visible to developers.