Let’s say I am making an app that has table Category and table User. Each user has their own set of categories they created for themselves. Category has its own Id identity that is auto-incremented in an sqlite db.
Now I was thinking, since this is the ID that users will be seeing in their url when editing a category for example, shouldn’t it be an ID specific only to them? If the user makes 5 categories they should see IDs from 1 to 5, not start with 14223 or whichever was the next internal ID in the database. After all when querying the data I will only be showing them their own categories so I will always be filtering on UserId anyway.
So let’s say I add a new column called “UserSpecificCategoryId” or something like that - how do I make sure it is autogenerated in a safe way and stays unique per user? Do I have to do it manually in the code (which sounds annoying), use some sort of db trigger (we hate triggers, right?) or is this something I shouldn’t even be bothering with in the first place?
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You could also just use a random non-numeric primary key. For example you could generate a string of 8 random characters + numbers. That would give you well over 2 billion possible IDs.
This is the kind of stuff that UUID’s are good for. When you want to generate non conflicting unique id’s. Even across systems and over time.
