Do you use Row ID or Unique Identifier for things like "Order ID" and "User ID"?

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I’m trying to understand why I wouldn’t use Row ID for all unique identifiers :thinking:

The answer is probably nuanced, but hearing people’s personal examples/use cases will help me understand pros/cons of using Row ID as unique identifiers.

The benefit I see of Row ID is they are …

  1. easier to implement
  2. more secure (or reliable) since it can’t be modified

Thoughts?

Much appreciated.

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I use (and would advise) using RowID for probably 95% of use cases.

The only time I’ll use a Unique Identifier is in a situation where a RowID can’t be used, or isn’t appropriate.

An example of this is when I’m creating a parent record and want to create one or more multiple related child records at the same time. In this situation, the ParentID (RowID) won’t be available to use with the child records, so I’ll use a Unique Identifier instead.

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Makes sense, and I should mention that we’re using exclusively Glide Tables. Makes even more sense since we’re not using GSheets.

Thanks for your thoughts Darren!

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@Robert_Petitto recently posted a great video on the subject

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I ran into an issue using user rowID instead of emails when applying row owners. I have a few tables that are interconnected: installations, inventory, removals, add ons.

I used user rowid in the “roles” section to be able to connect these tables but this means every user is considered private and I’m limited to 100 or so users.

But the problem with using emails is that users can’t change their emails, as it will disconnect any data that uses their previous email (those email fields in other tables are static)

Hope that made sense.

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“Roles” are really just a way to group users into an ownership group. Using RowID as the data source for roles guarantees that you will create groups of one, exactly like using an email address. So you might as well apply row ownership to the email column rather than roles to the RowID column.

It’s clear what you are trying to do: associate the app account to a UserID instead of the user’s email address so your users can change their email address and still have access to their account. As far as I know, this is not possible: for now, access to an app is tied to a unique email address and cannot be tied to another piece of data such as a UserID, phone number or other email address.

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