Creating Columns with Named ID's

I do a lot of work with monday in Integromat.

It is much more convenient there when the column id is more descriptive than “stauts8”. The best solution would to be able to create columns with specific ids without having to use the API in the playground. There used to be a work around for this. But, that recently got changed.

Today, I needed to add another column to a group of active boards. And, I was again facing this issue.

I didn’t like it!

So, I spent way too much time coming up with a solution that will work for me.

I created a board “Add Column” with a link column and a button. Added an Integromat scenario. Sprinkled some fairy dust. Voila! Now that it’s done, here’s how I add a column with an id that is meaningful to me:

  1. Add the board I want to add the column to (if not already done).
  2. Link to any item on the board.
  3. Add the column(s) I want.
  4. Name the column(s).
  5. Click the button.

I’m sure others could improve on it. And, hopefully it won’t be needed long.

I’m posting here just in case anyone else might be interested.

Let me know.

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Hi JCorrell

What I did is using the module ‘set multiple variables’ in integromat. From there I can use my column names in the rest of the scenario.

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Very cool! I have worked increasingly with Integromat to integrate different apps with Monday.com, but I had never used the Add Column to Board. Thanks very much.

Hi @JCorrell, thank you for sharing this with our community!

This is feedback that I’m happy to share with our devs, but what a great workaround for now.

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Hi JCorrell,

I would really like to try your workaround… but unfortunately I don’t understand it!

Please could you explain with a few screenshots or a Loom video or something?

Thanks!
Dominic

@Dominic,

I’ll try to put something together soon.

In the meantime, here’s a simpler alternative that works for many cases:

  1. Create a text column.
  2. Change the column title to the name you want.
  3. Change the column type to the type you want.

Good one! Although this super-simple alternative workaround only works for a subset of new column types:

Monday Subset of Column Types

Monday Test Name Success

It seems that this workaround may no longer be functional.
Can anyone confirm?

@tmadonia Yes, I can confirm that the workaround is no longer possible.

The auto generated Column IDs provide no context when trying to build any integration outside of monday.com. it becomes an incredible time waster.

If there is a real need to set the columnId for newly generated columns (to be honest I don’t know why and I would favor it to be just a bigint like the boardId and the itemId) you can do so by creating a column through the API Playground.

The columnId in this case is “my_own_number”. Remember that the next time you run this the columnId will be less obvious, in my case the second time I ran this the columnId was “my_own_number0”

This is also not working now.
Could you suggest some other option ?

@AartiKulkarni,

It appears that monday has removed all abilities to create columns with named IDs. The IDs are now reflecting the column type exclusively.


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This was released – you can now specify a ‘column_id’ when creating a column: Columns

Just a note: you need to ensure the ID follows a specific format (no special characters, less than 20 characters, etc). More details in the doc.

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