How to create short uuid with Django

Question

I have a model and UUID as primary key field. UUID id is way too long. I'd like to have it short similar to YouTube.

class Video(models.Model):
    id = models.UUIDField(
        primary_key=True, 
        default=uuid.uuid4, 
        editable=False,
    )

Instead of this

UUID('b39596dd-10c9-42c9-91ee-9e45b78ce3c1')

I want to have just this

UUID('b39596dd')

How can I achieve above?

Answer 1

A bit old question, but shortuuidfield may be what you are looking for.

Answer 2

The first part of the uuid is defined as the time_low so we can do this, however it will no longer be a uuid.UUID type.

sample = uuid.uuid4()

UUID('6af2fd74-fbaf-4a9a-a973-8d052634a624')

tl = sample.time_low

1794309492L

Then we just convert it back to hex,

hex(int(tl.time_low))[2:]

'6af2fd74'

You can do the same thing with just splitting it as a normal string but I don't see why it matters. Once you assign this to a variable it's a given so you can parse it as you choose.

Answer 3

You can use shortuuid library:

from shortuuid.django_fields import ShortUUIDField
id = ShortUUIDField(primary_key=True, length=11, max_length=11)

But you should pay attention to this issue. The smaller the size of the UUID, the higher the probability of Collision.