UUID instead of an auto-increment integer for ID with Active Record

How-tos

2.0

mysql,active record,REST,UUID

> I have a dream ... I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration of bad design of Active Record. I have an API. It's built with a RestESTful extension over Active Record, and some endpoints provide PUT methods to upload files. By a REST design we create an entity with `POST /video` first, and then upload a video file with `PUT /video/{id}/data`. How do we get the `{id}`? The essential solutuion is UUID generated by a client. It allows API application to be stateless and scale it, use master-master replication for databases and feel yourself a modern guy. If you have Poistgres - lucky you, feel free to use the built-in UUID data type and close this article.
With MySQL the essential solution is [insert into users values(unhex(replace(uuid(),'-',''))...](https://mysqlserverteam.com/storing-uuid-values-in-mysql-tables/)
MySQL team recommends updating our INSERT queries. With Active Record it is not really possible.If you design the application from ground up, you can use defferent fields for a binary and text representation of UUID, and reference them in different parts of an application, but I am bound to the legacy code.

Adding `getId()/`/`setId()` won't help - data comes from a client in JSON and fills the model object with a `setAttributes()` call avoiding generic magic methods. Here's the hack: Step 1 a. Add a private $idText; property ```php
class Video extends ActiveRecord
{Step 2 add two filters

```php
['id','match', 'pattern'=>'/^[0-9a-f]{8}-[0-9a-f]{4}-[1-5][0-9a-f]{3}-[89ab][0-9a-f]{3}-[0-9a-f]{12}$/i'],
// convert UUID from text value to binary and store the text value in a private variableStep 3. Add getters

```php
public function __get($name)
{Step 4. add a virtual column

```sql
ALTER TABLE t1 ADD id_text varchar(36) generated always as
(insert(
insert(
insert(
insert(hex(id_bin),9,0,'-'),