Re: Random Unique ID

On Sat, 2007-03-24 at 08:24 -0400, Jim McIntyre wrote: > IIRC, the OP wanted to generate a unique key precisely to keep from > revealing the record ID to the end user... what about taking the > auto_increment value (easy to generate, assured to be unique) adding its > MD5 hash to another column in the table, then using that as the > "published" ID? > > The only disadvantage I see is that the MD5 hash isn't very > human-friendly, so using it for an account or member number, or something > like that the user might have to write down or read to a customer service > rep on the phone, might be difficult. It's more likely that he wants the unique ID so that he can serve up a document or image such that other documents or images can't be retrieved just by incrementing the ID in the URL. Cheers, Rob. -- .------------------------------------------------------------. | InterJinn Application Framework - http://www.interjinn.com | :------------------------------------------------------------: | An application and templating framework for PHP. Boasting | | a powerful, scalable system for accessing system services | | such as forms, properties, sessions, and caches. InterJinn | | also provides an extremely flexible architecture for | | creating re-usable components quickly and easily. | `------------------------------------------------------------'