If trying to create a Collection with a field called "id" an error occur and not cleanly

Report a bug
1

Whne creating a Collection (using new cloud based collections version of Create) and you try to create a field in the Collection called ‘id’, when you Save the Collection you get an error saying fields can not be named ‘id’, but then the New Collection button has disappeared!

You CAN get the “New Collection” button back by swicthing to “Data Views” (tab) and then back to “Collections”, so a work-around is present.

Also the error occur only when Saving teh Collection and the Collection is not saved. if I created a Collection with a 100 fields, one of which was ‘id’ and it was not saved due to the error, so I had to recreate the whole thing, I’d be a little upset. Better to generate the error when a field is named ‘id’ instead of upon Saving.

Lastly, if I want to treat “Collections” as tables like in a SQL database, and allow the Name field to be editable, I would normally use an ‘id’ field to link to other tables. If ‘id’ is reserved, should I just use a numeric field with some other name like ‘recordid’ or ‘identifier’ or whatever?

2

@Researchware Create auto generates IDs for each record in a collection, so there’s no need to define an ID field directly - it’s all handled for you.

We will look to handle that ID error you discovered better in future versions.