RE: Creating seperate unique ids within the same table

I am curious why you think it is anti-practice to expose primary keys for user-visible purposes.

My URLs all have the PK to the object in them, and any advanced user would be able to "reverse engineer" a URL if they guess the PK of an object—and that's okay.

Even Django tutorials suggest using the PK in the URL of an object.

I'm just curious.

 

From: django-users@googlegroups.com [mailto:django-users@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of bill.torcaso.oxfam@gmail.com
Sent: Monday, October 22, 2018 10:20 AM
To: Django users
Subject: Re: Creating seperate unique ids within the same table

 

 

Joel,

 

I completely agree that UUIDs are not memorable.

 

I still think you would be well-served to make a UUID the basis for uniquely defining a person.  If you want to further add a short name, you could make an object class that has a UUID and, say, an 8-digit number.  If you assert that the two are unique together, you will get a database-level guarantee of uniqueness at creation-time.

This is just an opinion, but I think it an anti-practice to expose a primary key for any user-visible purpose.

If you don't like UUID's for your purpose, you might consider the random number generator in PyCrypto.

On Monday, October 22, 2018 at 10:20:02 AM UTC-4, Joel wrote:

Thank you Bill. I had a look at UUIDs. One of the important criteria I
had was that these IDs should be easily memorable. Unfortunately UUIDs
are not memorable, being too long to remember. :(

Sincerely yours,

Joel G Mathew


On Mon, 22 Oct 2018 at 19:40, <bill.torc...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello all,
>
> The previous discussion shows a method that will work.  but I think it has disadvantages, and I want to suggest  another approach.
>
> The disadvantage of using a primary key from a table, any table, is that you are committing to that table and that primary key for all eternity.   this has consequences for migration to another system , for merging in data from an external system, among others.
>
> Joel, if I understand your situation, you have a "thing", an individual human being, and you need a permanent, unique identifier for that "thing".  The identifier should not be an implementation detail of your current code, but should be robust, sharable, and resilient in the face of evolving software.
>
> I faced a similar situation with digital assets that are photos and videos.  We share photos and videos across several related sites, but we don't want to duplicate the asset for each site.
>
> My solution is to generate a UUID, a Universally Unique IDentifier,  when creating the "thing" - see python 3 at https://docs.python.org/3/library/uuid.html. or python 2 at https://docs.python.org/2/library/uuid.html.
>
> A Universally Unique IDentifier is guaranteed not to collide with any other UUID, and so independent systems can generate one at any time - no need to coordinate with a central database or across separate servers.
>
> A UUID is robust in the face of name changes - such as a maiden name becoming a married name.
>
> I would recommend a UUID over exposing a primary key, hands down, all the time, no exceptions.
>
> --  Bill
>
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