Is there a difference/different use case between using ROW ID in data editor vs. creating a Unique ID column in Sheet?

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I have gone through this part of the library but these seem to be used interchangeably?

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RowIDs, if I remember right, was born to act on user-specific columns. You can use them as unique IDs for that row as well, but a while ago there was a bug about rowIDs being changed randomly.

UniqueIDs, after being generated through the form, won’t be changed.

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RowIDs are also automatically generated, so if you are entering data into the sheet manually, or it comes from some other source, then glide will still generate the RowID. Unique ID needs to come from an Add/Edit/Form in the app. But as @ThinhDinh pointed out, RowID is needed for some additional functions in glide.

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So this makes me ask, is it just best practice to use the ROW ID? It seems easier…

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Beware of the issue here, you can have a brief read of this conversation.

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To be fair to glide:

  1. I had a script re-ordering the sheet after a row was added.
  2. As rows where added and move to the middle, Glide and Sheets got into a conflict, where Glide thought that the ID belonged to a certain ROW in Sheets but sheets already moved them around. This cause Glide to repopulate the Sheets ID’s based on the ROWID of the records.

As I think @Jeff_Hager clearly started “Don’t change things with scripts”.

The hallway gossip is of course Glide working towards their own Sheet / Data structure and or allowing other sheet based SAAS tool to run Glide. From that perspective Glide should be the ‘master’ record keeping. (but all that is a little off topic)

If you use it straight fwd there is no issue in using the glide RowID.

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