Question

I’m looking for a fast & elegant way of converting my object IDs with descriptive names, so that my autogenerated routes look like:

/products/oak-table-25x25-3-1

instead of

/products/5bd8c59c-fc37-40c3-bf79-dd30e79b55a5

In this sample:

uid  = "5bd8c59c-fc37-40c3-bf79-dd30e79b55a5"
name = "Oak table (25x25) 3/1"

I don’t even know how that feature could be named, so that I might google for it.

The problem that I see so far is the uniqueness of that “url-object-name”, for example if I have two oak tables 25×35 in the db, and their names differ too little to be uniquely url-named but enough to fool the unique constraint in the db.

I’m thinking of writing that function for name-transform in SQL as an UDF, then adding a calculated field that returns it, then unique-constraining that field.

Is there some more mainstream way of achieving that?

Answer 1

One method is that employed by stackoverflow.com which in your case would be:

/products/5bd8c59c-fc37-40c3-bf79-dd30e79b55a5/oak-table-25×25-3-1

This ensures uniqueness, however the length of the UUID may be a deterrent. You may consider adding a sequential int or bigint identity value to the products table in addition to the uniqueidentifier field. This however would require an additional index on that column for lookup, though a similar index would be required for a Url having only a descritive string. Yet another method would be to use a hash value, seeded by date for instance, which you can compose with the descriptive name. It is simpler to rely on a sequential ID value generated by a database, but if you envision use NoSQL storage mechanisms in the future you may consider using an externally generated hash value to append.