Order number

[NZ_Kiwis]

I want to submit orders from a website into my DB and it return a order number... I could do a ID from the DB but i'm not getting thousands of orders and I don't want order number 10 or 11 i want something like W4345D or something W being Web and D being Direct payment...

How could I do this.... was thinking last 5 numbers in a unix timestamp but that may not be unique but then again with the amount of orders i've go would it matter??

Any other ideas??

[jazz_snob]

You could create a "next order number" function (or class) that you call to generate the order number...maybe its the ID from the DB plus some value (like 100?) and it figures out what letter to prefix the order number with. Would probably mean inserting the order, getting the insert id, calling the next number function, then updating the order record.

We just set the first record in the database to 1000 and anywhere the order number is printed it goes thru a function that puts a prefix infront of the ID, so thats another approach.

[NogDog]

Or you could define your orders table to have its primary key field be an auto-incremented integer, and specify that the numbering start at some sufficiently large number.

CREATE TABLE orders (
  order_number INT(6) UNSIGNED AUTO_INCREMENT PRIMARY KEY,
  <...other columns...>
)
AUTO_INCREMENT = 100001;

[m_tt]

If you truly want random, high value numbers, I recommend creating a function. For example:

$order_id = null;
while( $order_id === null )
{
	$id = rand( 1, 9999999 );
	if ( !$dupe = $dbh->getOne("SELECT `order_id` FROM `orders` WHERE `order_id` = {$id} LIMIT 1") )
	{
		$order_id = $id;
	}
}

Sorry for the DB class, habits never die, you'll have to modify that on your own.

Also, do not forget to set your SQL field to ZEROFILL if you want to be sure that all IDs are the same length. IE: '000701129' instead of '701129'