Sequential numbering of items by bulk edit action

[wordpresschef]

Hi,

I’m struggling on implementing a bulk action to change the field of a type called “order number” in order to populate this field with a sequential number.

In the single “create thing” workflow I’m easily getting the order number by using this expression:

order number = do search for “thing”: count + 1

but If I apply the same expression into an API Workflow make change action, I get the same number for all the records.

Thank you

[adamhholmes]

Use a recursive workflow…

[keith]

For a super in-depth discussion of this in Bubble, see this thread (but start first with the reply post I link to below):

How to achieve Unique, Sequential Numbers Reliably?

A WORD OF WARNING THAT SOME OF THE SOLUTIONS PEOPLE OFFERED ABOVE ARE NOT RELIABLE AND YOU MAY, IN FACT, GET DUPLICATES OR WORSE UNLESS YOU USE THE FOLLOWING METHOD AS - I HAVE TESTED THEM ALL JUST LIKE KEITH DID Not knowing this caused me a lot of issues and setbacks so I hope it saves others. The solution that works perfectly and reliably in bubble natively is the solution buried at the end of Keith’s great video - and all the reasons are explained by him. in summary the soluti…

More recently, I posted an updated solution that is more scalable and performant, here:

How to achieve Unique, Sequential Numbers Reliably?

OK… further to my previous musings… While @morgan’s summary of the correct solution (posted June 2020 above) is still correct, there is in fact a slightly different way to do this that: is likely more much performant for large databases (i.e., when you start to get into huge numbers of orders or whatever it is you are assigning a sequential serial number to) and gets around the issue pointed out by @krzysztof.adamski (here) that :make static seems to crap out on lists that have more than …

[wordpresschef]

Hi,

thank you for the suggestion, but in my case it seems not working:

https://capture.dropbox.com/TgfH5bsVweZZOFSF

the generated number is equal for all the records and ( total number of them )…

[keith]

You’re not reading the very clear explanation in Morgan’s post carefully. You don’t just do this in some random backend workflow, you do this in a database Trigger workflow.

[wordpresschef]

Hi,

for what I understood, the field change would be applied on a database trigger, order creation in the mentioned example, but what I was looking for was a “bulk execution” of “incremental number” for each thing in my DB.

[NigelG]

@keith

you do this in a database Trigger workflow.

Ran a database Trigger against c. 250k records. It fired < c. 250k times. Not by that much, but it missed a couple.

Ramble on Sequential Numbering … A huge big massive IBM mainframe system running at an Italian Insurance company absolutely 100% no-excuses had to number invoices and receipts sequentially with no gaps unless you registered those gaps with the government.

The solution was non-trivial and the load testing extensive. We had to single thread a “dealer” to push out numbers. Which nowadays would probably look like an in-memory database (Redis or something like that). Still non-trivial.