Forum Discussion
Raydris
Dec 15, 2022Copper Contributor
Creating unique ID's in bulk
Hi,
I want users to be able to "book" 99 unique ID's as they please, in my SharePoint List, and it needs to be sequential. So when a user clicks "new" a new row with a bulk of 99 unique ID's are created, which the user can assign to himself.
Example:
1. | A00000 to A00099 | Assigned to Jeff
2. | A00100 to A00199 | Assigned to Jeff2
3. | A00200 to A00299 | Assigned to Jeff3
Etc. I will have two others columns where I can designate the number being taken, and who took it.
However, for the ID column (see example) I am not sure on how to format it, so that it would produce the sequential ID when a user wants to add a new row (as to book the next 99 new unique numbers).
Any immediate ideas?
My immediate idea was to manually add a bunch of rows in a single text field, and let users book them, and then manually add new ones when it starts to run out... but I am certain this could be automated. Any help or direction would be appreciated, thanks.
- RobElliottSilver Contributor
Raydris the way you describe it doesn't seem to me to be efficient and is prone to error. And surely it means that in your flow you are going to need 99 "create item" actions! Not a good idea although you could set the flow concurrency to 1 to reduce that risk of error.
If I was doing this I would have a separate list for each user so that when a new item is added for that user it is automatically sequential (for that user) because of the ID.
Then I'd build a Power Apps front end that gets the items assigned to that user (based on their M365 login) in a gallery, they can add new items etc. You could then have a screen or a flow that grabs all the assigned items from each list and puts it into an email or a separate "master" list.
Rob
Los Gallardos
Intranet, SharePoint and Power Platform Manager (and classic 1967 Morris Traveller driver)- RaydrisCopper Contributor
Thank you RobElliott , for taking the time to review my question.
We are a small team of 6 people creating unique ID's for the products we produce - today we are using an excel sheet for this exact purpose I described above. There's a separate list (master list for products) where team members have to add each new product (or edit) and fill in columns (either single row, or an automated bulk dump) - which only accepts unique numbers in a set format (same format as the 99 bulk unique ID's). Thus, each user doesn't have its own unique ID, you could say the whole team has the same ID format.
The convenience quickly outweighs the risk (for us at least). I will probably be adding new sequential numbers in bulk manually, as it usually takes a team member months to "spend" his bulk of 99 unique numbers, and request a new bulk. I want my engineers to spend minimal time
I just wanted a way out of using this excel sheet, as I have plans to integrate and automate the sharepoint list further into PowerApps (so they dont have to deal with lists (back-end) but a PowerApp interface (Fron-end). But alas, if it is simpler to manually add bulk, i can take an hour or two to manually add in this format which will probably clear the need for the next couple of years 😉