Change primary key for custom value

thecosmo

Hi there!

I am creating an application in Ray3 to store incident data. To do this, I need to link several entities.

When creating an entity, the system automatically creates a primary key with a given name and I cannot change its name.

One of the solutions I suggested would be to create another field in the entity, which I would independently assign as a primary key, but I cannot do this.

I would be very glad if you could help me solve my problem.
Thanks in advance

gabriel

Hello and welcome to the forum 🙂

The primary key is one of the few abstractions we need as a low code tool to function correctly. It is automatically generated and used for relationships, polices, change logs and so on. Unfortunately we cannot change this behaviour without enormous efforts and we see very little benefit in doing so.

Could you please elaborate why you need the primary key named differently?

thecosmo

gabriel
Hello, Gabriel
Thank you for your answer. It was the weekend so i saw Your answer now

I would find this useful because I want to link several entities together and it would be much more convenient to have a more precise name for the primary key (in my case it is "incident_id"), rather than just an abstract "id".

I understood that in REI3 the primary keys in each entity are called "id", but do I understand correctly that if I want to link, for example, two entities together, then I will need to create a separate attribute so that the key names do not duplicate each other's names (in the case of Rei3 it is "id") or can I link two entities by the "id" attributes that come by default?

Example:
I am creating an "incidents" entity, in which I will store basic information about an incident, and the primary key will be "id" (not "incident_id", as I would like).
I want to link the "incidents" entity with the "objects" entity - one incident can correspond to several objects (a "1-to-many" relationship) - do I need to create a special attribute to link these entities?

gabriel

To create the relationship you described, you´d create a "relationship" attribute (type n:1) on your relation objects. You could name this attribute incident if you want.

In r3 would then find this relationship as objects.incident -> n:1 -> incident.id. The id attribute does not need to be renamed because it always represents the primary key of the relation it is in. When looking at relationships, you know that id refers to the current relation, while any other name (like incident or incident_id if you prefer) points to the primary key of the connected relation.

We have a basic tutorial on how to work with relationships in r3. It is however not any custom or special implementation, it strictly follows basic relational models: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlUgwoDt4GM&t=358s