Question

In a nutshell, I’m making a booking app. Booking id needs to start at 10000 and increase by one each new booking.

I’ve started coding a method to generate this booking number. What I’m struggling with is:

1. On first run, there will be no booking numbers so I can’t simply add 1 to the last id in the database table. I need a way to check if the last number does in fact have a base of 10000.

I’m using cake php and the way I’m getting the id number is using

$ids = $this->find('first', array('order' => 'Booking.id DESC', 'fields' => 'Booking.id'));

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You could either re-create the Booking table or alter it so that the id field starts at 10000.

Re-Create:

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS Booking;
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS Booking (
    id INT NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
    /* Other fields here */
    PRIMARY KEY (id)
) AUTO_INCREMENT = 10000;

Or Alter:

ALTER TABLE Booking AUTO_INCREMENT = 10000;

You would only have to do this once. Afterward, you could be a lot more sure that the last Booking id was 10000 or greater.