CODEWITHSUNDEEP
phpmysqllaravel
JesseJames
JesseJames

Reputation: 55

how to add auto generated alphanumeric key in id_column

What happens is a user comes on site, fills create a new product form with title, description, price et cetera fields...

I want to store a unique generated alphanumeric key in my 'id' column which is set to auto_increment by default, use that unique key as my product_id. Like every Youtube video has its own generated unique key rather than having id like '1', '2', '3'....

I'm generating that key using "uniqid();" function.

Please do let me know if I'm doing it wrong or there is better approach to do this. I'm a complete rookie.

Upvotes: 1

Views: 467

Answers (1)

Abhay Maurya
Abhay Maurya

Reputation: 12277

The following two things cannot be true simultaneously:

  • unique generated alphanumeric key
  • 'id' column which is set to auto_increment by default

You cannot have a alphanumeric key which is auto_increment because by definition, alphanumeric means a string created with alphabets and numbers and you cannot auto increment alphabets, makes sense?

So my suggestion is that you leave the "id" key numeric as 1, 2, 3 etc and create one more column in your table, name it "unique_id" lets say. Of course you can name it whatever you like. It needs to be VARCHAR(255) type.

And then populate that column using following functions:

$bytes = 12;
$uniqueId = bin2hex(openssl_random_pseudo_bytes($bytes)); //this will create 24 char alphanumeric string, you can increase or decrease it by changing the $bytes

and put this $uniqueId into your column and voila, you have your unique id of the entity.

UPDATE

In order to show the alphanumeric unique id in your url, you need to change your url structure from /localhost/product/product_id to /localhost/product/product_unique_id and I am assuming you have somewhere your product listed with some kind of hyperlink, clicking on which takes user to the product detail page, right?

Let's say you had a product which has id 1 and unique id lt4Zhr7 so simply where you list products, you give the unique id of the product like so:

<a href="/localhost/product/lt4Zhr7"> Product 1 </a>

This is a basic solution which is supposed to guide you in the right direction, your actual code might be different based upon the framework you are using or some other factor.

Upvotes: 1

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