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Hey All!
Something I discovered a little while ago that may be of interest to someone at some point.
You might already know the potential dangers of "e" in Unique IDs. Google Sheets sometimes interprets it as scientific notation and mucks up the data, leading to broken references in your app, as in 11524E22.
What you may not know are hex codes can be interperated by AppSheet as Date Time! This occurs in much the same way as the "e" error, but instead invovles "a".
Take the value "2024a01" for example. It gets translated into 1/1/2024 12:00:00 AM
Here is an example of an eight character hex code that UNIQUEID() could actually generate on its own:
In general this shouldn't affect too much, but I think it's important to keep in mind. I recently had an issue occur where a report couldn't count records accurately and it was the ID being translated into a Date Time value that was the cause of the issue, and changing the ID to a different value was able to correct it.
If you're ever having unusual results and errors you can't quite pin down, check your IDs! There's a chance something about it is being treated with unexpected behavior!
This also could have some benefints. If you need a short hand expression for a Date Time value, this format could become your best friend!
