this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2024
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Making a database identifier unique per user? (programming.dev)
submitted 3 months ago by Cyno@programming.dev to c/learn_programming@programming.dev
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Let's say I am making an app that has table Category and table User. Each user has their own set of categories they created for themselves. Category has its own Id identity that is auto-incremented in an sqlite db.

Now I was thinking, since this is the ID that users will be seeing in their url when editing a category for example, shouldn't it be an ID specific only to them? If the user makes 5 categories they should see IDs from 1 to 5, not start with 14223 or whichever was the next internal ID in the database. After all when querying the data I will only be showing them their own categories so I will always be filtering on UserId anyway.

So let's say I add a new column called "UserSpecificCategoryId" or something like that - how do I make sure it is autogenerated in a safe way and stays unique per user? Do I have to do it manually in the code (which sounds annoying), use some sort of db trigger (we hate triggers, right?) or is this something I shouldn't even be bothering with in the first place?

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[โ€“] dbx12@programming.dev 3 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I think you shouldn't bother. First, as another user already said, the normal user does not look much at the address bar. Second, how will you work with deletions? Say user created 4 categories 1-4 and deletes category 2. Now you either have a hole or you "reindex" the categories to 1-3, which is probably bad since it breaks any bookmarks the user created.

[โ€“] Cyno@programming.dev 1 points 3 months ago

Deletions would work the same way as with a regular autoincrementing ID, it just always goes up. All it matters is that it doesn't expose how many other IDs are in the DB