A Better Auto Number

[Aaron_Owen]

So I have a couple of tables that I use to link deliverables to jobs and tasks to deliverables. Each line on these linked tables don’t really have a name that makes sense, so I use a number. I’ve used auto number reluctantly because it’s sort of a “dumb” auto number. By “dumb” I mean that it starts at 1 and increments from there. If I delete something out of the row, it picks up where the last increment was. If I delete something at the end of my list, now my nicely numbered rows are missing a number.

I’d like to be able to start the auto number at an arbitrary number, and turn on an option to make sure that it is “smart” about the way it increments so that it looks at the last number currently in the table and adds 1 (n+1) rather than a simple (i++ ).

[Paul_Warren]

An autonumber that could have leading numbers would be awesome. I admit I can create this using a series of IF statements to add the leading zeros, but a built in feature with autonumber would be really nice. Especially if you need a large number.

[Markus_Wernig]

Is there any news on how Autonumber works / or doesn’t work with “ghost rows”?

Ghost rows are an extremely annoying Airtable behavior. Quite a few of our collaborators keep creating blank rows by accidents (it’s happened to me too). That always throws our numbering system off. I only want Autonumbers assigned to actual records not erroneously created rows.

Right now I keep converting the Autonumber field to a text field and back to Autonumber. A simple reset button in the Autonumber field would do the trick.

[Paul_Warren]

@Markus_Wernig,

One recommendation I can give is to use permissions to prevent collaborators form being able to add or delete records without forms. It would be much easier to ensure the record being created is intentional when a form is used.

Obviously, there are downsides to using a form. If you need to input many records, you can unlock the permissions temporarily and then put them back in place when you are done.

Hope this helps while Airtable works on improving Autonumber and implementing an iterative operator. Both are sorely needed.

[dk82734]

There’s one big issue that’s been missing in this discussion – which is to update auto-number values whenever a user drags records up and down in a table.

For some reason, currently, when a user drags records up and down in a view, Airtable does not see that activity as an sort of material change to a record. This is problematic, because I can’t even build API automation fire webhooks whenever a record’s relative position in a view changes. Because of this limitation, I can’t figure out how to programmatically update auto-numbering whenever a user performs these operations.

This is frustrating, to say the least.

In short, I’d like an auto-number option that:

1. Has no numerical “gaps” between records
2. Whenever a user drags records up and down in a view, then auto-number values automatically update to reflect their relative position.

[Dominik_Bosnjak]

This is a dead topic, but regardless, what you’re asking for will never be addressed by Airtable imo. Due to reasons that I can only speculate about, though they are surely numerous from Airtable’s perspective, starting with the fact that this is a non-issue which was meant to be left to the community to “solve” via the Scripting app.

Yeah, JavaScript is fast enough to handle state-level HTML monitoring and does so already. But adding one more function reliant on ultra-low latency to a codebase that might have already taken some hostages in protest of Airtable’s scalability? The won’t do it, especially since that functionality requires minimal fiddling with the Scripting app to reproduce (the row recalculation, that is, drag event listeners aren’t so simple because of the platform restrictions imposed as part of a pretty straightforward security policy).

[kuovonne]

The relative position of a record in a view is not a part of the record’s data. Records can have different positions in different views.