We’ve heard your feedback and are bringing back the ability to name column IDs with a new system behavior!
Starting February 13th, if you create a column via the API with a title of 20 characters or less, the column ID will relate to the title. For example, if your column title is This is my column, then the column ID will be this_is_my_column.
If your title is more than 20 characters, the system will randomly generate a column ID based on the column_type and an ongoing index. It will not be related to the column title.
This update will only impact new columns, not existing ones.
We understand this may be a breaking change for some developers who previously relied on our column naming convention, so please implement this new behavior accordingly!
Thanks for your question. You are correct - there is no way to change the ID of an existing column. Once you create the column and set the ID, you cannot change it.
This new update that relates the column ID to the title will only impact new columns!
I tried yesterday afternoon to create a new column using API with the title “firstname” for example.
It works fine, the ID is “firstname”.
After that, i deleted the new created column and tried to re-create it.
The column ID was not as expected the second time.
The ID was “firstnameX” where X is a number.
Even if i delete the only “firstname” column and purge the trashbin, all new column with the title “firstname” have a number at the end.
Is there a cache ? is it a bug or a normal behaviour with this new feature ?
Welcome to the community! We hope you like it here
That’s a great question! The behavior that you explained is not a bug. If you create a column of any type, any following columns of the same type will have a number after the column title (even if you delete the column).
+1 for the above frustration. Monday’s column names are an enduring source of frustration and this bug fix only continues the behaviour that makes it really difficult to do work on Monday’s API.
I’ve done the same as Marc, necessarily deleting a newly created column (via API) then recreating it across 77 boards, only to find that now, each column has a unique number in the id. Why does Monday need to do this, when the id format was acceptable as title: “New Column”, id: “new_column”?
The new columns are unusable in this application, they must each have the same id.
I realise that I can now delete the uniquely named columns from all 77 boards then recreate columns with a new name/id combo and even change the title of the new columns so that clients can see exactly what we want them to… but this is a lot of trouble and I would ask what do we get for it?
@rflynn and team, I appreciate your efforts in announcing this change but seriously, “We’ve heard your feedback” rings a bit hollow when this is the result.
