Spaces in model ids not supported.

[thomasfedb]

I have an external database which has text identifiers, some of which end in a trailing space.

When using global ids with these records, the global ids generated fail to be parsed, and therefore lookup also fails.

Perhaps model ids should be urlencoded?

[thomasfedb]

Here's an example of this issue in action:

irb(main):015:0> Tutorial.find("R-SKC ").id
=> "R-SKC "
irb(main):019:0> Tutorial.find("R-SKC ").to_global_id.to_s
=> "gid://tenjin/Tutorial/R-SKC "
irb(main):020:0> GlobalID.parse("gid://tenjin/Tutorial/R-SKC ")
=> nil

[kaspth]

I'm not sure how common this is. Does overriding to_global_id in your model work? You'd probably need a custom locator to whip the model id back into shape.

[matthewd]

@kaspth needing to support trailing spaces might be an edge case, but that's what encoding schemes are for.

AIUI, we're currently insisting (well, assuming) that all identifiers contain only characters that are safe unescaped in a URL path segment. Are we deriving some benefit from that restriction, beyond not having to call a method? 😕

[thomasfedb]

@kaspth I think this is less a case of 'trailing spaces are weird, why would anybody need that' and more a case of the fact that ActiveRecord supports a far wider range of values as IDs than GlobalID. It would be nice to fix that.

Also, for the majority of cases, urlencoding the ID should be backwards compatible.

[kaspth]

@matthewd @thomasfedb Sorry for being slow here. You're both right, and Active Record supporting many more types of ids is why we should fix this.

@thomasfedb would you be interested in opening a PR? 😄