IDs to reference Messages and Variants

[jldec]

Context

Lint reports need to reference Messages (in a MessageBundle) and Variants (in a Message).
This means that we need unique identifiers for Messages and Variants in our apis.

• Using array indices in the AST is not good enough (breaks when entities are added)
• Using a combination of the Message Bundle id, and the locale, would be an option for Messages
• Similarly, variants for a specific Message could be identified by their select matches
• Using something like uuids is simpler but requires additional memory

Do the ids need to be persisted?

• yes if references (from lint reports) need be stable across sessions.

See INLMC-85

Proposal

• instead of globally unique ids (uuid) I would suggest shorter keys, only unique within a project.

cc: @samuel.stroschein @martin.lysk1

[jldec]

added to persistence project and bumped in priority

[samuelstroschein]

i agree that everything needs ids: message bundles (human ids), messages, variants

only unique within a project.

what algorithm to you propose? uuid might be longer but uniqueness in a distributed system should be OK. Plus, good libraries exist.

[jldec]

good point - id's not only have to be unique within one instance of the project, but across all project instances that create new ids and then commit them.

one option would be random 8 or 10 character base-36 strings - 36**8 gives you >10**12

[samuelstroschein]

is the effort of a custom id solution worth it though? uuid seems straightforward. the cost of marginally more space complexity seems OK. We can introduce a more optimized ID algorithm later if the requirement comes up