Allow ListID to be alphanumeric??

[kchung]

Is there a reason why List IDs have to be numbers only?

I upload leads from different sources for different campaigns daily.

What I would like to do is upload lists w/ 2-3 letter prefix to denote type of leads followed by the date ie: INS20060927 = insurance leads for Sept 27, 2006.

Is it safe for me to edit my code to allow for chars in the Lead ID?

[mflorell]

could you use the vendor_lead_code for that type of information?

You could alter all of the tables that have lead_id in them to whatever you want and the system would run just fine.

We chose to use INT(9) AUTO-INCREMENT UNIQUE to keep the table clean and quick.

[kchung]

I mean list_id, not lead_id.

[mflorell]

If you change all tables and the admin.php code you should be able to use alpha characters in the list_id.

We wanted to keep it numeric only so that vicidial_list would be sorted by list_id faster than if it was alpha-numeric.

[kchung]

Exactly how much impact does it have?

[mflorell]

depends on the size of your vicidial_list table. With 6 million records it is significant enough to notice the difference between BIGINT and VARCHAR(20).

[kchung]

damn, that is huge. Does your company routinely deal with 6m records? what do you'all call?!

[mflorell]

When we were doing a few large campaigns at once we did keep 6m records in the vicidial_list table. Now we keep it to less than 1million.