Key field question

[kjhaugh]

I am just started down the road of AppSheets and love it but need help.

I work with a non-profit organization and am building an app to manage maintenance requests for them. I create an “ID” column as the first column of the tables I create. So, for example, the RESIDENT table’s first column is “Resident_ID”, the second column is Last Name, the third column is First Name, etc. Other tables are Units, Maintenance Records, Issues, Maintenance Staff. I know I will have to develop relationships between each of the tables but I’m not there yet.

When I import the tables in the MyApp web interface, the system created a field called “_ComputedKey” in the “Resident” table and concatenated the Last Name and First Name fields. Question: Is it better to use that “_ComputedKey” field as the key field OR use the “Resident_ID” field as my key. If the latter, will the system automatically create the unique data in the “Resident_ID” field in the underlying Resident table?

I ask because I use to work with Access tables and always stated each table with a “tablename_ID” field and then manually established the relationships between tables.

Any help you can provide would be greatly appreciated.
Ken