Customer ID or Employee ID

[Steve_Whitaker]

Noob here. Working on AppSheet for a small company. Traditionally, I would have an Employee ID and a Customer ID included as fields for Employees and Customers data sets. Am I correct to say such ID fields are no longer necessary? Duplicate data records will some how be figured out by AppSheet? Thanks. SW

[SkrOYC]

Steve_Whitaker:

Am I correct to say such ID fields are no longer necessary?

It depends.
I follow this criteria about ID/Key columns.
Always UNIQUEID() and hidden.
This means that ID is just used as a reference to relate tables on the backend.
If you are talking about the ID that is shown on the ID Card, this is just another field of the table that should not serve another purpose rather than extra info from an AppSheet app perspective (IMO).
Anyway, you need a key column on your tables.

Steve_Whitaker:

Duplicate data records will some how be figured out by AppSheet?

When it comes to the Key of each row, yes, appsheet doesn’t allow to enter the same Key value twice.
But, you shouldn’t be using manual Key values.
If you need to have some sort of ID column that is not the Table’s key, you could create a Valid_If expression

How to Prevent Duplicate Records Tips & Tricks 💡

A very common type of validation you’ll want to add to your app is the ability to restrict people from entering duplicate information. Such as not being able to add a contact into the “Contacts” table if they already exists; same with Products, Clients, Users, VehicleIDs, What-Have-Yous. Preventing duplicates in this way is very straight-forward in AppSheet; all you need is a validation formula in the Valid If space for the column you want to prevent duplicates on. Not(In([_THIS], SELECT(Tabl…

[Steve_Whitaker]

Thanks, Oscar!