Hi Angela,
Most of the entries inside of a tech doc are stored only in the content. Things like Titles, Subtitles, Lists, etc. are all only going to be accessible by parsing the XML in the content property. There are a handful of exceptions to this which can basically be boiled down to things that bring up separate dialogs when you add them like Images, Links, External Content, and Item references. However, these references use a separate ref-id attribute in order to link themselves to XML elements in the content.
The aras:id attribute you found doesn't reference an item in the database. It's randomly generated as you add new elements via the editor. I don't know exactly what it's used for, but it's just there to serve as a unique identifier in case the element needs to be looked up at some point.
One resource I'd recommend looking at if you're planning on also writing TechDoc content is this blog post on using Content Generators. These are specially formatted server methods that can be used to generate tech doc content based on some item information. It need a little more finessing since you're intending to call this via the REST API, but it should help save some of the hassle of actually writing the content to the document.
Chris
Christopher Gillis
Aras Labs Software Engineer
