Task IDs (Notion)

How to implement something like task IDs or card IDs in Notion, similar to Trello - Card-IDs (Trello)?

There seems to be no out-of-the-box solution, but there is a global ID for each entity.

Additionally, there are some workarounds that seem quite convoluted

Overview

Approaches to create task- od card IDs:

Manual
Global IDs
Notionthings.com: Create real IDs, from Global IDs + joined table
Datestamp-IDs: Create IDs based on creation datestamps of objects
NotionPlusID
API ?

Manual

Just add a field Task-ID or Card-ID and give it manually a number, when needed.

GlobalIDs

Rows of database tables do have a global ID. They can be retrieved with the function id(). They are quite long and unwieldly, like cef53e69b99d426f8ad5a00bd9f6e5f3.

Notionthings.com

Solution here from Notionthings.com. I think it's as impressive as it may be convoluted.

How it seems to work:

Create a database table used for ids only - id table
Relate a database table that needs IDs to this table
In the main table, have a rollup function that copies the id() value from the id table
Do some rollup stuff back-and-forth between these tables, that eventually count the number of commas that separate those ids
Use that count +1 as the id for the next row.

Let's see if there are easier solutions.

Sources:

Datestamp IDs

Derive an ID from the Created time date/time stamp. E.g.:

Step 1:

toNumber((prop("Created time"))

1674667620000
1674667380000
Etc.

Step 2:

toNumber((prop("Created time"))/10000

167466762
167466738
Etc.

Step 3:

Note that the timestamps are 9 character long
Keep the last 4 digits Unix Epoch Time

slice(format(toNumber((prop("Created time"))/10000),5)

6762
6738
Etc.

Issues:

There is about 0.7% change that multiple cards get the same ID, when your project has 70 cards
The sequence of IDs might cycle multiple times during the project, going from 9xx to 0yy, which might be confusing. To avoid this, you probably need 6 to 8 digits, which I personally think, is quite unwieldly
You need all 4 digits at any time. It doesn't start e.g., at code '1'.

Conclusions: Too messy to my taste.

NotionPlusID

[1]: A free extension to generate automatically incrementing ticket numbers. It can be run as-is or self-hosted

How it seems to work - When self-hosted [2]:

Deploy something within a free Terraform account - Middlewhere?
Deploy the app within a free Google Cloud Platform account
Enable NotionPlusID in your Notion database.

To use the 'SAAS' version:

Just click on the website at the button to install it
Grant permissions
Create in a database table a field called PlusID, type number and it will become an ID-field
The trick is, that the title has to be exactly PlusID (bit weird, in certain ways).

What I really like about NotionPlusID: It shows me, that you can make sophisticated stuff in a user-friendly way in Notion. I'm only less thrilled that you have to use a 'trick' to enable an ID column, that actually breaks the structure of the system: Functionality now depends on the name of the column.

API?

I guess you can program it yourself through the API - In the end, that's what NotionPlusID does.

Sources

Task IDs (Notion)

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