• Converted to Gem ported by C. Jason Harrelson (midas)

This plugin for ActiveRecord makes the “ID” field into a URL-safe GUID It is a mashup by Andy Singleton <andy@assembla.com> that includes

• the UUID class from Bob Aman.

• the plugin skeleton from Demetrius Nunes

• the 22 character URL-safe format from Andy Singleton

You can get standard 36 char UUID formats instead TODO: Auto-detect a character ID field and use a GUID in this case (DRY principle)

It has been extended by Brian Morearty with:

• the addition of a mysql_create function (configurable with a guid_generator accessor) for much better performance

• id assignment is now done before_create instead of after_initialize, to more closely mimic the default Rails behavior of assigning an id upon save.

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the MIT license.

define ID as char(22) call “usesguid” in ActiveRecord class declaration, like:

class Mymodel < ActiveRecord::Base
  usesguid			
end

If your ID field is not called “ID”, call “usesguid :column =>‘IdColumnName’”

In order to use a GUID in another field that is not your primary key, id call usesguid like:

class Mymodel < ActiveRecord::Base
  usesguid, :as => :field
end

If you would like to validate your GUID a validation macro is provided:

class Mymodel < ActiveRecord::Base
  usesguid, :as => :field

  validate_guid
end

validate_guid is the same as:

validates_presence_of( ActiveRecord::Base.guid_column )
validates_uniqueness_of( ActiveRecord::Base.guid_column )
validates_length_of( ActiveRecord::Base.guid_column, :maximum => (ActiveRecord::Base.guid_compression == 's22' ? 22 : 36), :allow_blank => true )

If you use MySQL or SQL Server as your database, you can make guid generation much faster by using the database to generate GUIDs.

You can accomplish this by specifying the GUID generator in an initializer file. There are also options for guid_compression and guid_column.

ActiveRecord::Base.guid_generator   = :mysql # mysql or sqlserver
ActiveRecord::Base.guid_compression = :s     # :s for string or :s22 for compressed string
ActiveRecord::Base.guid_column      = 'guid' # the name of your GUID column