TUID

Tagged Unique IDs

Developer Friendly:

• K-sortable
• Collision-free, coordination-free, dependency-free
• Just strings on the outside
• Tagged with underscore prefix to help with validation and act as a psuedo-type
• UUIDv7 encodes creation date

User Friendly:

• Base58 encoded
  • Shorten string representation in URLs and other places
  • Prevent confusing letters like lowercase L or Oh/zero
• Tagged with underscore prefix to reduce confusion
• Copy/paste friendly, double-click selectable

Installation

This package can be installed by adding tuid to your list of dependencies in mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:tuid, "~> 0.1.0"}
  ]
end

Add the following code to a single schema module to use TUID columns like so:

  @primary_key {:id, TUID, prefix: unquote(prefix), autogenerate: true}
  @foreign_key_type TUID
  schema "books" do
    field :title, :string
    field :author, :string
  end

Migrations should look like the following:

  create table(:books, primary_key: false) do
    add :id, :uuid, primary_key: true
    add :title, :string
    add :author, :string
  end

You may also create MyApp.Schema module and use that in place of Ecto.Schema in your schema modules. Typically, the MyApp.Schema is saved to lib/my_app/schema.ex

defmodule MyApp.Schema do
  @moduledoc """
  This module defines the default schema settings for schema modules
  in MyApp.

  Primary and foreign keys use TUIDs.

  ## Usage

      defmodule MyApp.Accounts.Account do
        use MyApp.Schema, prefix: "acct"

        # ...
      end
  """

  defmacro __using__(opts \\ []) do
    prefix = Keyword.fetch!(opts, :prefix)

    quote do
      use Ecto.Schema

      @primary_key {:id, TUID.ParameterizedType, prefix: unquote(prefix), autogenerate: true}
      @foreign_key_type TUID.ParameterizedType

      @type t :: %__MODULE__{}
    end
  end
end

Schema modules then should look like:

defmodule MyApp.Library.Book do
  use MyApp.Schema, prefix: "book"

  import Ecto.Changeset

  schema "books" do
    field :title, :string
    field :author, :string
  end

  ...
     
end

Credit and inspiration

This project is based on the code and blog post from Dan Shultzer's base 62 implementation.

https://danschultzer.com/posts/prefixed-base62-uuidv7-object-ids-with-ecto

Other projects of similar nature

• ksuid
  • https://github.com/segmentio/ksuid
• TypeID
  • https://github.com/jetpack-io/typeid