Row IDs (specification)

First of all: it is very very impressive how many excellent design decisions you have made for the Glide platform. Thank you so much for building Glide.

Question: Is there a specification for Row IDs that I can take a look at? E.g. how they are constructed or what kind of characters they might contain (now and going forward?). I noticed they sometimes include dots (".") but not always.

Context:

I am currently working on documentation for how to add Clubhouse-like audio rooms (powered by Jam (https://jamshelf.com)) to Glide apps. In a sense Jam is an audio room server which lets you construct an audio room via an URL that you then can add to your app using an iframe.

Every room on Jam has an ID, those IDs are at least 4 characters long, alphanumeric (upper and lowercase) and can also contain minus signs ("-").

Very similar to Row IDs on Glide.

Unfortunately IDs for rooms on Jam can not include dots (".") at the moment (because we want to avoid confusion with potential future URLs that end in .json or similar).

Now Glide has Row IDs which are super helpful but it seems like they can sometimes contain characters we would not expect in IDs used for Jam which means we can’t use Row IDs as they are.

My current workaround is to create another column which is a “template” that replaces “.” in Row ID values with “-” which seems to work well (h/t @Karim). But I am not sure how robust that is @ potential collisions and if dots are the only characters that can appear in Row IDs which cause problems for us.

Do you have a specification or description about Row IDs? I only found

https://docs.glideapps.com/all/reference/data-editor/computed-columns/row-ids

which doesn’t describe them in detail.

Cheers & again thank you for building Glide!

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Welcome @tosh !

We hope that you’re going to have a good time onboard the Glide Community.

:tada:

Is this document answering somehow your question or do you need more :

Let us know !

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Also check out the unique “special column” value which uses a standard UUID

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How do I get this special column?

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Looking forward to this @tosh

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https://docs.glideapps.com/all/reference/values/special-values/unique-identifier

https://docs.glideapps.com/all/reference/values/special-values

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I think this is what @V88 meant, thanks a lot for the pointer!

https://docs.glideapps.com/all/reference/values/special-values/unique-identifier

Unique IDs (that look like UUID v4) can be used as unique value in the context of user input (e.g. when adding to a list). The format of these IDs looks compatible with Jam room IDs.

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Yup. That’s it. Let us know if it works!

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