Unique ID’s for Gravity Forms
One of the Gravity Perks plugins offered by Gravity Wiz, Unique ID’s for Gravity Forms does just what it says. It allows you to add one or more fields to a gravity form with a unique (to that form) group of characters and/or numbers formatted with your choice of prefix and suffix. Click here for full documentation.
Not only can you add a set prefix/suffix (eg, ‘INV’ or ‘Application#’) you can choose alphanumeric, numeric, sequential numbering (or random), start number, length etc. There are literally thousands of ways this Perk can be useful.
GravWorks suggests you consider the following additional uses for this Perk.
Member Number
Giving each new user a unique ‘Member Number (M#)’ can be very useful. When a user submits a GravityForms form their UserID is stored as part of that record. This is useful to control future viewing or editing of that record, as well as a history of activity. But there are times when you might want to change ownership of a record, or grant access to edit the record to another user (other than the record owner).
Why?
Giving each GravityForms Form a unique identifying number also makes sense and provides a great deal of functionality. Not only does this keep a relationship and hierarchy record, but it will simplify future actions of the full records (perhaps you want to change control of a company to a new user).
Here are some examples
- You want users to create an Organisation record (and there will be many of these). When that user submits an organisation form, you store that users M# in the new record, and use the Unique ID field to add a new ORG# to this new record.
- You might want to allow each Organisation to add several products or services on your site. When a user presses an ‘Add Product’ button showing on the Organisation record, they are presented with the Product form that has pre populated all relevant data from the Organisation form (M#, ORG#, address, contact) and also added a unique PROD# to that record.
- Same for Services (SERV#), same for Events (EVNT#), Same for Class (Class#), Appoint#, etc
Audit Trail
Used in this way you are maintaining an audit trail of record ownership (User based), but also an hierarchical structure of record relationships. Once set up, there is no admin cost to maintaining this record, it happens automatically on each form submission.
Efficiency
Traditional programmers may feel very uncomfortable with the repetitive duplication of data for each record. Millions of hours of development for relational databases was applied in the past to eliminate such wasteful data repetition. But times change and data storage cost and bandwidth has improved. If you were developing major world wide high capacity systems this wouldn’t be the best approach. But for small to medium (companies say) purposes this approach will work efficiently.
Recommendation
So Gravitywiz’ Unique ID’s for Gravity Forms Perk is perfect for this, and strongly recommended. Their range of Perks are frankly astounding, and they also provide free Tutorials and Snippets some of which you may find invaluable. You can see all GravityWiz Perks on their site, check out their Pricing and see all the documentation. If you sign up for a GravWorks website, the entire GravityWiz Perks range is included for that site.
Follow Up
In other posts we will show you how this information can be used to display a Company’s details, and also then show lists of that Company’s Products, Services, Events etc (perhaps using a different example). Structuring Unique ID’s with simple appropriate prefixes simplifies site administration. We’ll show you how. Should you show or hide Unique ID’s? We’ll discuss Pros and Cons, and it depends.
