Need to get a unique number between 1 - 1000 for every respondent

Question

This is tougher than I thought it should be.  Figured we'd use quotas...and use the quota count.  BUT if two respondents complete their forms at (or near) the same time, the quota count will show the same value.  Even though the quota decrements properly, the quota count at the time of completion will show the same.  Tried generating a Random Number between 1 and 1000, but that gave us duplicates too (4 times out of ever 20 or so).  Need to get a unique number, between 1 and 1000, without duplicates.  We need this to then provide a special username and password for a research study.  This way everything is anonymous, but logged against these values.  Looking for a genius idea of how to ensure each respondent gets a unique number from our pool of numbers.  Ideas?

ahmedA · Answer

One possible flow could be:Generate between 1-1000Check with previously generated numbers (See here)If it's unique, assign to participant and update generated numbersIf it's not. Got to step 1.This would be more reliable with random strings of a fixed length.However, If the numbers being between 1-1000 is not essential, then you could just run Date.now(), strip a few leading digits and assign that. In the same timezone, two people would need to have the exact same start time at the precision of milliseconds to get the same number, however this could be an issue in different time zones and system clocks. To add some jitter, you could use performance.now(). Ref

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