Creating order ID's

[Eiolon]

I am not sure if this is something that is handled on the database side or from PHP.

Basically, if I order something online I am given an order ID that consists of many letters and/or numbers (i.e. #1000001)

I am wanting to do something similar.  I have a field called order_id but that is the record ID which I don't think is a good thing to have exposed.  So I am wanting to know a good way to implement something like this.  Any suggestions?  Thanks!

[printf]

If you don't want to use the unique auto_increment column, then you can create a column called 'whatever', then insert something like...

[code]ALTER TABLE your_table ADD order_hash CHAR( 32 ) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci NOT NULL AFTER some_column;

ALTER TABLE your_table ADD INDEX ( order_hash ) ;[/code]

Where as...

your_table = would be changed to your table name!
order_hash = would be changed to the name you want the new column to be named as!
some_column = would be changed to the column name you want the new (order_hash) column to be inserted after.

Then when you create a new order to insert into your order table you could create a hash like so!

[code]$insert_order_id = md5 ( uniqid ( microtime () ) );[/code]

printf

[fenway]

A unique index would also probably be in order.