[Feature Request] Prefixed DB IDs

[andrewpeters9]

❗ This issue is a work in progress, I'll do a bit more research into the implementation details.

Motivation:

• Prefixed IDs allow for the identification of the model with which the ID acts as a primary key for
• The Stripe team has published a great article on the benefits of this: https://dev.to/stripe/designing-apis-for-humans-object-ids-3o5a
• TLDR:
  • Quickly allows for the identification of potential bugs
  • Better aids readability & observability
• A point that was omitted from the article: allows for the use of templated literal types in TS, such as prefix_${string} - which greatly increases type-safety, as casting an ID to simply string can be a massive source of bugs in large projects

Technical implementation:

• Still looking into this, will update later on, but for now:
• Looks like it will have to be implemented via a small custom plugin in the DB
• If wanting to avoid the plugin, then this might work?

Postgres:

CREATE TABLE users (
  id VARCHAR(50) PRIMARY KEY DEFAULT 'user_' || REPLACE(gen_random_uuid()::text, '-', ''),
  name VARCHAR(100)
);

MySQL:

CREATE TABLE users (
  id VARCHAR(50) PRIMARY KEY DEFAULT CONCAT('user_', REPLACE(UUID(), '-', '')),
  name VARCHAR(100)
);

Application vs DB Layer:

• Stripe mentions in their blog post that they implement this prefixing at the DB layer, as opposed to the application layer
• This helps when having to inspect ids that don't originate from the app layer, e.g. data dumps, direct DB queries etc. - at the cost of a slightly larger DB