Skip to main content

Serial numbers

Introduction​

Serial numbers are numbers that may contain fully customisable formats. For example, invoices may need to have its own numbering because database ID's are inherently not build for this. An example serial number may be: INV.0023.

Getting started​

To use serial numbers, you will have to create one first.

Creating a serial number​

Qore provides a SerialNumberCreator which you may use in a seeder:

class SerialNumbersSeeder extends Seeder
{
    public function run()
    {
        /** @var SerialNumberCreator $creator */
        $creator = app(SerialNumberCreator::class);

                         // Name           // Description    // Format
        $creator->create('male_employees', 'Male employees', 'E[MM].[YY].[XXXX]');
    }
}

Adding a column​

You are free to choose where to store your generated numbers. For this example we will add a serial_number to our employees table:

$table->string('serial_number')
    // Optionally nullable
    ->nullable();

Definitions​

Tags​

Serial numbers may contain pre-defined tags:

[YY] (Year short) : 21 [YYYY] (Year long) : 2021 [M] (Month short) : 6 [MM] (Month long) : 06 [X] (The number) : 1 [XXXX] (The number with leading zero's) : 0001

Example: TAS[YYYY].[M]-[XXXX] TAS2022.4-0494

Rules​

A serial number should at least contain [X], this will determine where the number will be placed.

Generating serial numbers​

Qore provides a Field to generate serial numbers to resources automatically:

                                        // Column        // Name
SerialNumber::make(__('Serial number'), 'serial_number', 'male_employees')

This field will fill the generated serial number when creating the resource.

Generating manually​

In some cases you might want to generate numbers manually based on conditions:

/** @var SerialNumberGenerator $generator */
$generator= app(SerialNumberGenerator::class);

$model->serial_number = $generator->generate('male_employees');
$model->save()

You can also generate a number without updating the serial_numbers table by default (which it does by default) by supplying false as a third argument:

/** @var SerialNumberGenerator $generator */
$generator = app(SerialNumberGenerator::class);
$number = $generator->generate('male_employees', null, false);