Hi, I’m not sure if this is a bug or a feature that needs to be built. I asked support about this once but didn’t really understand the response. I’d like to request that Public ID’s generate in order of their “existence” within a database. That is, every new entity is the next Public ID after th…

Actually, public IDs are generated in incremental order, but IDs cannot be reused. So if you create 99 projects but then delete numbers 2 to 99, the next one will be given number 100, even though it appears to be only the second project that exists.

@Chr1sG , thanks for the response. That is what I would have assumed, but the reason I’m asking is I see some behavior that I’m pretty sure contradicts what you’re saying. Here is a table from one our db’s: [image] I am fairly certain we did not delete the entities in between the ones that are …

You can probably go through your audit log to see if there were items created between Dec 4th and Dec 10th to check whether it is behaving as expected. Wrt sorting, since public ids are incremented for each newly created entity, sorting by creation date is the same as sorting by public Id (at least…

Ok thanks @Chr1sG for the response. I have looked at this issue closely enough to the point where I wanted to post this thread because it does not behave as you are suggesting. We have a few other db’s and they have similar patterns of skipping public ID’s. We did not create, then delete, those e…

Thanks for posting all that - very useful. I shall indeed ask internally to see if there are reasons why the current intended behaviour is not being reflected in your workspace. [image] B_Sp: If you guys think that’s redundant since you can sort by creation date, then that’s fine. Absolutely…

Thanks for the response! I went ahead and looked at this more closely, here is the very most recent db we created, if you notice it started last year, and there are no ID’s skipped here with entities created gradually over about a 9 month span: [image] Here is another db and you can see how the …

Was there ever a resolution to this topic? I’m potentially struggling with the same issue. Also struggling to understand why I cannot either (1) sort by the public ID. (2) easily transform the public ID into a number with a formula. Whenever I tell the Public ID to display as a formula it turns …

Public ids are not integers. the data type is a string.

[image] CivicScribe88: Was there ever a resolution to this topic? What is there to be resolved? Public IDs are assigned to the next unused number when an entity is created (and IDs are never reused, so this includes deleted entities). [image] CivicScribe88: sort by the public ID As @…

[image] Chr1sG: Public IDs are assigned to the next unused number when an entity is created Quick note to this - any attempt to create a new entity will consume the next available number for the public id, even if the creation attempt fails, So for example, if an attempt is made to simultaneo…

Public ID's numbering should go in order of entity creation

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Chr1sG September 5, 2026, 8:16am 14

You can. But it is text, so it doesn’t sort the way you might expect for numbers.

It’s a feature that we haven’t implemented yet.

We couldn’t find anything to indicate that the designed behaviour of public IDs (incremented im order of each entity creation) is not being followed.
B_Sp might have experienced an anomaly/bug back in 2020 - we just have not been able to reproduce.
(I should have posted that back in June 2022)

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Public ID's numbering should go in order of entity creation

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