CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

all civi tables have an id column

as such id by itself is never unique IF you are referring to multiple tables.

in most cases, where there is only one instance of an ID being referred to, we use the table name (w/o the civicrm_), so

contact_id, event_id, address_id etc

however in some cases where there are multiple contacts involved (relationship, activity etc), we use different names based on context

contact_id_a, contact_id_b

OR

source_contact_id, target_contact_id (which is an array), assignee_contact_id, created_id etc

so in general, IMO, the convention of "TABLENAME"_id should work in most cases

We need to remember that names/labels by their very definition are ambiguous, so trying to put too much order into them might be an exercise worth avoiding

lobo

we should do this for ALL the tables and hence all the xml files

however its a pretty big change and we'd prefer to do this at the start of a release cycle than just before code freeze

i'd vote to do it in trunk when we branch 3.4 / 4.0

lobo