How to generate unique student id (e.g 2014-444-168) in laravel

Question

I am creating an enrollment system that should generate an unique student id upon submitting a form. The unique id is not included in the form field. Rather it will be generated using the store method in the StudentController class. Please refer to my code below.

class StudentController extends Controller
{
    public function __construct()
    {
        $this->middleware('auth');
    }
    public function store(StudentRequest $request)
    {
        $student = Student::create($request->all());

        $student->id_no = "12345669";

        $student->save();

        return redirect('index');
    }
}

As shown above I want to create the student id. Can someone please suggest best practices of doing the above task

Answer 1

This will be unique:

$student->id_no = date("Y").'-'.$student->id;

And even this will be unique:

$student->id

Because it's auto incremented primary key and it can't be duplicated.

Answer 2

You can append a string to the $student->id and generate similar but unique values. Like you find in college ids.