🆔UUIDs
What is a UUID?
Wikipedia summarises this very well:
A Universally Unique Identifier (UUID) is a 128-bit label used for information in computer systems. The term Globally Unique Identifier (GUID) is also used, mostly in Microsoft systems.[1]
When generated according to the standard methods, UUIDs are, for practical purposes, unique. Their uniqueness does not depend on a central registration authority or coordination between the parties generating them, unlike most other numbering schemes. While the probability that a UUID will be duplicated is not zero, it is generally considered close enough to zero to be negligible.[2][3]
Thus, anyone can create a UUID and use it to identify something with near certainty that the identifier does not duplicate one that has already been, or will be, created to identify something else. Information labeled with UUIDs by independent parties can therefore be later combined into a single database or transmitted on the same channel, with a negligible probability of duplication.
Adoption of UUIDs is widespread, with many computing platforms providing support for generating them and for parsing their textual representation.
How Plannr uses UUIDs
We use UUIDs in our resources as the primary identifier. For those familiar with database normalisation and primary keys, we use UUIDs instead of exposing the record's primary key from our database which is widely seen as a security best practice in modern APIs.
We use UUIDs in our API urls instead of primary ids, so making a request to grab a single plan in Plannr's API will look like the following, where {plan_uuid} is replaced with the real UUID of the plan you want to collect.
Finding UUIDs
Making a request to any of Plannr's list methods (e.g. /contacts or /plans) will return an array of items where each item will contain its own UUID. The UUIDs are unique for each item and can be relied upon as a primary / unique identifier for that record.
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