alphanumeric id

rubyonrails-talk
1

I am working on a ticketing system, and the client has requested a special format for a ticket id the format would be alphanumeric with a 3 character client tag, date, then a incremental number for the day, for example

ticket1 = 'joe_03232008_00001' ticket2 = 'joe_03232008_00002' ticket3 = joe_03242008_00001' etc

is there any way to get rails to allow custom formatted id's? also, is this going to add alot of overhead? I can expect as many as 5000 tickets per day. Is indexing going to become a problem?

BTW: I am working on a system that is coded in Rails 1.2.3, I can't upgrade to 2.0 right now so the solution needs to be compatible.

Thanks -Will

2

You want to be careful not to couple the id of the record to business logic. It is best for you to have another field to handle this; or just have a method that returns this ticket identifier you are after.

3

I am working on a ticketing system, and the client has requested a special format for a ticket id the format would be alphanumeric with a 3 character client tag, date, then a incremental number for the day, for example

ticket1 = 'joe_03232008_00001' ticket2 = 'joe_03232008_00002' ticket3 = joe_03242008_00001' etc

is there any way to get rails to allow custom formatted id's? also, is this going to add alot of overhead? I can expect as many as 5000 tickets per day. Is indexing going to become a problem?

BTW: I am working on a system that is coded in Rails 1.2.3, I can't upgrade to 2.0 right now so the solution needs to be compatible.