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Item ID is your own identifier for an Item — the plant number, asset number, or tag number your business already uses. Unlike Name, it is unique within the Collection, which makes it the field you use to tell two similar Items apart.

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Uniqueness and blank values

No two Items in the same Collection can hold the same Item ID. The constraint is per Collection, so “EXC-203” in Heavy Equipment and “EXC-203” in Hire Fleet are fine — the same value twice in one Collection is rejected. Item ID is optional. Values are trimmed before they are stored, and a blank or whitespace-only value is stored as no value at all, so any number of Items in a Collection can have no Item ID without colliding with each other. Trimming also means " EXC-203 " and "EXC-203" are the same Item ID, not two different ones.

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Where Item ID appears

  • In the items table, and as the subtitle under an Item’s name when another Item references it through a reference field.
  • In the search box of the item picker inside the item form, alongside Name and Description.
  • In bindings, as {{item.item_id}} — usable in a Destination URL such as https://example.com/items/{{item.item_id}}. Bindings are inserted exactly as stored with no URL encoding, so keep Item IDs free of spaces and & if you build URLs from them.
If the Collection generates Links from Item IDs, the Item ID is the Link’s slug. The Collection defines a mask — a prefix, a digit count, and an optional suffix, such as CRA####TL — and an Item with the Item ID CRA0042TL gets the Link qrtub.com/CRA0042TL. That mode adds real rules to this field:
  • The Item ID must match the mask. The check runs in the item form, in the API, and on CSV import, and a value like CRA42TL is rejected for having the wrong number of digits.
  • An Item saved with no Item ID is created successfully but gets no Link, because there is nothing to build the slug from. You will see a message saying so.
  • If that slug already exists as an unassigned Link — a code you pre-printed — the existing Link is adopted rather than duplicated. If it is already attached to a different Item, the save is rejected and you are told to pick an unused number.
None of this applies in the other link-generation modes, where Item ID is simply an identifier you keep for your own reference.

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Two behaviors that surprise people

Duplicating an Item never copies its Item ID, because the copy would collide on the uniqueness constraint. You are prompted for a new one instead. On CSV import, duplicate Item IDs are caught in the preview, before anything is written — both a value already used by another Item in the Collection and the same value appearing twice in the file. Those rows are rejected individually; the rest of the file still imports.