Counter Fields

Counter fields generate sequential, human-readable identifiers with a customizable prefix.

Creating a counter field

POST /api/apps/{app}/tables/invoices/fields
{
  "name": "number",
  "type": "counter",
  "config": {
    "prefix": "INV"
  }
}

This produces values like INV-000001, INV-000002, INV-000003.

How counters work

• Guaranteed unique across all records
• Padding starts at 6 digits and expands automatically as the table grows
• Values are assigned on record creation and cannot be changed
• Searchable via the global search endpoint – search for INV-42 to find INV-000042

Optional config

Option	Description
prefix	Uppercase A-Z, max 10 characters
suffix	Appended after the number (max 10 characters)
pad_length	Fixed zero-padding width instead of the default dynamic padding
start	First value in the sequence
step	Increment between values

Constraints

• One counter per table – a table can have at most one counter field
• The field is automatically named number regardless of the name you provide
• Prefix must be uppercase A-Z, max 10 characters

Counters are per table

There is no counter shared across several tables. Virtual tables once offered one; they were removed, and union views — which replaced the use case — deliberately have no union-level counter, because a counter that spans tables gives one record two identities.

Give each table its own counter with its own prefix. Reading them together through a union view then shows TASK-000001 beside INC-000004, where the prefix tells you which member a row came from without consulting the discriminator column.