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POQuestions about implementing surrogate key in Ruby on Rails
 

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  1. POQuestions about implementing surrogate key in Ruby on Rails
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    <p>For an upcoming project we need to have unique real world identifiers that are exposed to users for things like Account Numbers or Case Numbers (like a bug tracking ID). These will always be system generated and unchangeable. Right now we plan to run strictly on Heroku.</p> <p>While (as my name would suggest) I am new to the wonderfulness that is Ruby on Rails, I have a long background in enterprise application development. I'm trying to bridge between what I have done in the past while doing in the "RoR way"</p> <p>Obviously RoR has wonderful primary key support. I have read dozens of posts here recommending to adapt business requirements to just use the out of the box id/key methodology.</p> <p>So let me describe what I am trying to accomplish and please let me know if you have faced similar objectives and what approach you took.</p> <p>1) Would like to have a human readable key with a consistent length. There is value in always having an Account ID or Transaction ID that is the same length (for form validation, training sales staff, etc.) Using Ruby's innate key generation one could just add buffer characters (e.g. 100000 instead of 1).</p> <p>2) Compactness: My initial plan was to go with a base 36 unique key (e.g. 36 values [0..9],[a..z]). As part of our API/interface we plan on exposing certain non-confidential objects based on a shortform URL (e.g. xx.co/000001). I like the idea of being able to have a five character identifier in base 36 vs. 7+ in decimal.</p> <p>So I can think of two possible approaches: a) add my own field and develop my own unique key generator (or maybe someone will point me to one).</p> <p>b) Pad leading digits (and I assume I can force the unique key generation to start at 1xxxxxxx rather than 0000001). Then use the to_s(36) method to convert it to and from base 36 for all interactions with humans. Maybe even store the actual ID value in the database in the base 36 format to avoid ongoing conversions, but always do the conversion before a query to avoid the need to have another index.</p> <p>I'm leaning towards approach B, as it seems like it would be optimal from a DB performance standpoint and that it would require the least investment in non-value added overhead. Once again, any real world experience with these topics and thoughts on the best approach would be greatly appreciated.</p> <p>Thanks in advance!</p>
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