Random item how random is it (TRUE randomness in bubble's random item)

[mvandrei]

Hey forum,

I will have to select a random item from db and I was wondering, how good of a job does bubble at ‘really random’ numbers in this situation?
How exactly does it do it?

Looking forward to your replies!
Thanks!

[ambroisedlg]

Creating random unique IDs that do not duplicate

I am trying to store a unique 5 digit identifier to each new Supplier that is added to our database. I have tried a couple of ideas to no avail… Tried building 2 custom workflows that generate random numbers that loop into each other until a unique number that has been checked against the database is provided. However, this creates a bubble system error which makes sense, as this could eventually become recursive. Setup a simple when condition is true workflow (suggested by @emmanuel in th…

[mvandrei]

Thanks for the fast reply!
I was asking something a bit more different.
How RANDOM is the number generated from a list?
For example you have a thing called IDs, and you have from 0 to 100, need to extract one of them. Randomly.
How RANDOM is this number? See this for more info
So coming back to bubble, my question was: how does bubble gets a random (item) number?

[ambroisedlg]

Ah good point I thought you meant randomly generated strings. Unfortunately I’m not sure I can help on the :random item on a list sorry - interested to know more as well though

[mikeloc]

Well, if it helps, this is from Bubble’s manual…

:random item
Returns a random item from the list. Randomness is not guaranteed. The return may be biased in some way, so this is mostly for display purposes.

So, probably not so much with the true randomness.