sails: Unable to use UUID as primary key

Sails version: v1.0.0-36 Node version: any NPM version: any Operating system: any

Sails v1.x.x requires that id (or whatever the primary key is) is either set to required or autoIncrement. This makes it difficult (impossible?) to use a uuid (uuid.v4()) as the primary key.

In v0.12.x, either of these would work:

autoPK: false,
attributes: {
  id: {
    type: 'string',
    primaryKey: true,
    defaultsTo: function() {
      return uuid.v4();
    }
  }
}

autoPK: false,
attributes: {
  id: {
    type: 'string',
    primaryKey: true
  }
},
beforeCreate: function(values, cb) {
  values.id = uuid.v4();
  cb();
}

In v1.x.x, neither of the above work. Is there another way to use a uuid as the primary key?

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 7 years ago
Comments: 17 (3 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

Thanks @toni-ismail . Currently i am generating the UUID on controller side and using that as primary key in model with the following config. it’s seem working fine for me. Anyway i will give a try with your idea.

primaryKey: 'uuid',
  attributes: {
    uuid:      { type: 'string',required: true,isUUID: true}
}

umarfarook882 on Aug 29, 2018

Does the Sails project have more than 5 Years and there is still no functionality to generate UUID for IDs? Somewhere there must be some documentation for such a thing.

abalad on Aug 28, 2018

@deeyonn Please can you share with me the code of how you have done this in the blueprint?

updesh-jft on Feb 10, 2021

hi, is there an update/solution to make blueprint model attribute’s id to default to uuid v4?

What i want to do is to overwrite all models in config/models.js to have id assigned a varchar(36) uuid v4

EDIT: I used sails parseBlueprintOptions to set id = uuid for every create action

deeyonn on May 22, 2019

Does the Sails project have more than 5 Years and there is still no functionality to generate UUID for IDs? Somewhere there must be some documentation for such a thing.

That’s true. Even if the trick is easy it requires attention:

  [...]
  primaryKey: 'id',
  dontUseObjectIds: true,
  [...]
    id: {
      type: 'string',
      isUUID: true,
      columnName: '_id',
      unique: true,
    },

tleperou on Nov 26, 2018

Hi @umarfarook882 , @fenichelar ,

I’m sorry for the late comment, I just want to show how to setup model to use UUID with ‘sails-postgresql’.

on your postgree database, you need to create new extension : CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS "uuid-ossp";

on config/model.js :

migrate: 'drop',
 attributes: {
 id: { type: 'string', columnType: 'UUID DEFAULT uuid_generate_v4()', autoIncrement: true},
}

you should setting migrate to ‘drop’ or ‘safe’ if you setting to ‘alter’ you will get an error message.

You can find that ways on sails-postgresql code here https://github.com/balderdashy/sails-postgresql/blob/881275fc999e680f517eb4dccbc99a7bb3dbe1ce/helpers/private/schema/build-schema.js#L51

Hopes it can helps anyone who want to use UUID on their primary key. Thanks.

toni-ismail on Aug 24, 2018

@fenichelar When you use the automatic blueprint, you’re still setting some attributes, right? You should be able to set id as one of those. You’ll just need to generate your UUID on the front end.

sgress454 on Jun 13, 2017