When entity instances are transformed into data rows in a data table, they lose the special semantics attached to them in the Business Data Catalog, such as the ability to call instance methods on them. Serializing the identifier column enables you to call instance methods. When the Business Data Catalog serializes the ID column, it encodes it, so you must decode the ID column before you can use the ID values. To decode the ID column, use the EntityInstanceIdEncoder.DecodeEntityInstanceId() method and pass in ColNameSerializedId, which is the name the Business Data Catalog assigns to the serialized ID column. This decodes the identifiers and returns an array of identifier values.