Changing ReferenceItem:appendValue Default Behavior

When ReferenceItem::appendValue was originally implemented, it would do an append unique which resulted in N-squared behavior. Later we added an optional parameter to allow duplicates which would do a normal append. This was needed to deal with large number of values. However, the default for that parameter was set to “false” meaning that the default behavior was to do a unique append.

I would like to change the default to be “true” instead for the following reasons:

  1. Almost all of the operators are not specifying the optional parameter and therefore are doing an append unique instead of a regular append for their results, even though their algorithm already guarantees the values will be unique.
  2. The UI also already guarantees unique values will be appended as well.
  3. It seems that current workflows also by their nature also guarantees the values will be unique.

I’m getting ready to do a release of 12.11 and would like this change to make it in the release if everyone agrees.

+1

This seems very reasonable to me, +1