Building a global UUID to apply to certain content-types

This example application shows how you could inject a custom UUID field on certain content-types and automatically generate a random UUID during the create process for both the content and admin APIs.

This example is a refactored version of the same example from Strapi 4 which you can find here.

Injecting the UUID field

For this part we need to do it in the register phase to ensure it's actually created in the database as well. You can see this on lines 15-21 of the index.js file.

strapi.contentTypes['api::test.test'].attributes['someUUID'] = {
  type: 'string',
}

Generating the UUID

Once we have the field injected we can then use the documentService middlewares (no docs link for now) to generate the UUID. You can see this on lines 58-70 of the index.js file. This will programmatically add the middleware without needed to hard code it for every content-type

strapi.documents.use(async (ctx, next) => {
  if (
    contentTypes.includes(ctx?.contentType?.uid) &&
    ctx?.action === "create"
  ) {
    if (!ctx.args[0].data[uuidFieldName]) {
      ctx.args[0].data[uuidFieldName] = randomUUID();
    }
  }

  return next();
});

Configuring the content-manager edit view to disable the editing of the uuid

Now that we have the field injected and the value automatically created we need to disable the editing of the field in the content-manager. These are saved into the core-store collection in the database. You can see this in action on lines 32-56 index.js file.

const view = await strapi.db.query('strapi::core-store').findOne({
  where: {
    key: `plugin_content_manager_configuration_content_types::api::test.test`,
  },
});

let value = JSON.parse(view.value);

if (value?.metadatas[uuidFieldName]) {
  value.metadatas[uuidFieldName].edit = {
    label: "UUID",
    description: "Automatically generated UUID",
    placeholder: "",
    visible: true,
    editable: false,
  };
}

await strapi.db.query("strapi::core-store").update({
  where: { id: view.id },
  data: {
    value: JSON.stringify(value) || value.toString(),
  },
});