4. Short Inventory IDs

Date: 2020-03-25
Driver: Wisen Tanasa

Status

Accepted

Context

Our building id is currently generated from UUID, and it looks like 22cadcb6-00e5-4baa-a701-785854fc2a9e. We would like to make our building id shorter to make the seekers' UX better:

• They would be able to type the ID in the browser if they are printing the building page
• They would be able to share the URL without URL shortener

These are the decision criteria:

• Short
• Low collission probability (https://zelark.github.io/nano-id-cc/)
• Unambiguity, 0 (zero) and O (capital o) must not be confused
• Cost of implementation

Based on the above consideration, we have the following options:

1. 123456: Automatically generated sequence ID:
2. canvas: Manually generated ID
3. BBBB2221: Pretty generated letters and numbers
4. A4VHAOFG: Random generated letters and numbers
5. canvas-A4VH: Combination of building name and generated id

On a discussion and research:

• We ruled out option 1, as it will be to costly to implement. It requires new infrastructure to be provisioned as we're adopting serverless architecture. Generated sequence is a concept from RDBMS. if we randomly generate numbers, the collission probability is also quite high and will need longer id.
• We ruled out option 2, as it will involve too much human intervention
• We ruled out option 3, as we couldn't find a library that will easily support this
• We ruled out option 5, as we can use slug if we're concerned about the URL

Decision

• We will increase the ID length when we're scaling up
• We're going with option 4, and use nanoid with the following configuration:
  • Building ID:
    • ID Length: 6
    • Characters: 23456789ABCDEFGHJKMNPQRSTUVWXYZ
  • Space ID:
    • ID Length: 8
    • Characters: 0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
  • Provider ID:
    • ID Length: 5
    • Characters: 0123456789ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz

Consequences

• We may produce profanity words, but we're not bothered as we might get more traffic from the joke
• We don't have to provision any infrastructure, as the ID can be generated with nanoid tiny library
• If we generate 1 building ID per hour, we have 1% probability of 1 collission. We think this is quite high, and we don't think that we'll have 1 building ID per hour.