'Require entries to be unique' also for an Auto Generated primary field | Voters

'Require entries to be unique' also for an Auto Generated primary field

Dino Kovačević

Prevent a record from being created, by requiring an entry to be unique, when the primary field is set to Auto Generated. Possibly giving you an error saying you need to change a value/values in a field/fields that are used for the auto-generation of the primary field.

April 12, 2024

Thomas Barnekow

I would also love to see this and further suggest to extend this to formula fields as well.

My use case is that I am computing several kinds of IDs for records that are conceptually attached to a parent or container record (i.e., tree structures). Using an abstract example, an element is contained in a set. The set is identified by an ID like "21" or "32". The elements within the sets have component IDs (e.g., "100", "310") that must be unique within the respective set. The elements also have compound IDs, (e.g., "21-100", "21-310") that are computed from the set and element IDs. Those compound IDs must be unique within the table. Both constraints could be ensured by allowing unique constraints on formula fields. At least conceptually, this would be very similar to unique constraints on auto-generated titles.

Jon Darbyshire

Great to hear your perspective, Dino Kovačević! I have a few more questions for you:

Can you provide a specific example of when you encountered this issue?
What impact does this issue have on your workflow or productivity?
Are there any specific fields you would like this feature to be applied to?

Dino Kovačević

Hey Jon Darbyshire, here are my answers:

The specific example would be: The primary field's name is made up of values from two other fields from a record, as this best describes a record, hence Auto Generated option is the best choice.

If I use example from a client's case that would be the following: Client wants to track gift giving to their many business partners and they want to make sure that their employees (whoever goes to a business partner at that time) doesn't bring the same type of a gift that a business partner might have already received it previously. Employees, when selecting a gift to take to a business partner, are creating records in a table for tracking gift giving.

The client would like to make this fool-proof so that they are sure their employees won't be creating new records with the same values without needing to manually input each time they are creating a new record.
Yes, this would be applied to the Primary field.

Another solution for solving this challenge that would also be neat is if we could apply Spotlight function but without needing to manually input a value when creating a Spotlight.