25 October 2015 — Comments
Warning! This post was published about 7 years ago, so it can contain outdated information. Bear this in mind when putting it into practice or leaving new comments.
It's well known that using autoincrement identifiers for resources in a public API is not a very good idea, since you are exposing too much information about the size of your database and your business in general.
The PHP community is recommending to better use UUIDs these days, because it hides that information and can be generated anywhere and still be unique.
It has a number of advantages. The first one, as I already said, is the fact that it hides critical information of the system when you have to publicly share it, it is not easy to find out anything about the application business if you only have a UUID. But there are more:
I'm going to explain now, how to take advantage of UUIDs when working with databases in PHP applications by using Doctrine and the fantastic ramsey/uuid package, with the bridge library ramsey/uuid-doctrine.
Entities will have an ID, but instead of setting them with an autoincrement strategy and an integer type, we are going to use the uuid doctrine type and typehint the ID as a Ramsey\Uuid\UuidInterface.
We are also going to initialize the ID in the entity's constructor. Once the entity is created, it will have an ID, generated outside the database, but unique, so we can safely persist the entity.
namespace Acelaya\Blog\Entity;
use Ramsey\Uuid\Uuid;
use Ramsey\Uuid\UuidInterface;
/**
* @Entity
* @Table(name="user")
*/
class User
{
/**
* @var UuidInterface
*
* @Id
* @Column(type="uuid")
*/
protected $id;
/**
* @var string
*
* @Column(length=256)
*/
protected $username;
/**
* @var string
*
* @Column(length=256)
*/
protected $password;
/**
* @var string
*
* @Column(length=256)
*/
protected $fullName;
public function __construct()
{
$this->id = Uuid::uuid4();
}
// Getters and setters...
}
As you can see, we don't have to set the @GeneratedValue annotation in the id property, since the value is not generated in the database. Instead, it is initialized in the contructor.
The last example is very simple. We don't have to do anything, and our id will be a Ramsey\Uuid\Uuid instance, so we can compare it with other UUIDs and serialize it in many ways, but Doctrine doesn't know how to serialize and deserialize that field while exchanging data with the database. We need to register the uuid type.
use Doctrine\DBAL\Types\Type;
use Ramsey\Uuid\Doctrine\UuidType;
// Some kind of bootstrapping...
Type::addType('uuid', UuidType::class);
Once this is set, we can use the uuid doctrine type for any property and it will be properly serialized/unserialized. We just need to initialize those properties in our entities's constructors with the desired UUID version.