pblasucci / ananoid

Ananoid provides nano identifiers, an alternative to UUIDs.

Ananoid

Ananoid provides nano identifiers, an alternative to UUIDs. This project was inspired by https://github.com/ai/nanoid.

Overview

A nano identifier, or nanoid, is a randomly generated opaque value, suitable for uniquely identifying database entries, file names, et cetera.

Ananoid (pronounced: "an-an-oyd") is a library for generating such identifiers. It uses cryptographically secure random number generation, and has no dependencies beyond the dotnet 6 base class libraries. It has both a high-level API, and a simpler, more memory-efficient, low-level API.

Recommended Reading

• Getting Started
• API Documentation
• CHANGELOG

Installation via NuGet

The latest version of this package can be installed from NuGet via the following command:

> dotnet add package pblasucci.ananoid --version 1.1.0

Building from source

Prerequisites:

.NET SDK version 7, or higher (note, .NET 7 is required to build all the projects in this repository. However, consuming the pblasucci.ananoid.dll file only requires .NET 6).

Build steps:

1. Clone this repo.
2. From a command prompt, move into the root of th cloned repo.
3. Restore the necessary tools (eg: > dotnet tool restore).
4. Compile all project in the solution (eg: > dotnet build).
5. Run the test suite (eg: > dotnet test).

Preview the docs locally, with "hot reload":

From a command prompt (assuming a basic build and test has worked), run the following:

> dotnet fsdocs watch --port 2023 --input ./docSrc/ \
  --properties Configuration=Release \
  --sourcerepo https://github.com/pblasucci/ananoid

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Shout Outs!

Special thanks goes out to TheAngryByrd for doing all the dirty work around the mechanics of HTML layout / theming, which he then -- graciously -- made available under MIT License.

This repository's documentation would look much uglier without his efforts.

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Copyright

The library is available under the Mozilla Public License, Version 2.0. For more information see the project's License file.

ananoid's Issues

Parsing of empty strings should be more flexible

Currently, parsing an empty string (null, "", " ", et cetera) succeeds, but returns NanoId.Empty. In some scenarios, this is undesirable (ie: sometimes, parsing an empty string should fail).

Suggestion

Add additional functions (to modules) and input parameters (to methods) to support choosing the desired behavior. Specifically:

• new function in the Alphabet module
• new function in the NanoId module
• new overload of Alphabet.ParseNanoId or new method on Alphabet
• new overload of AlphabetExtensions.TryParseNanoId or new method on AlphabetExtensions

Also: update how-to guides!