Id type support on a per-collection basis

[JPrisk]

🙌 great to see the option of uuid's get added

following on the back of #3864, it'd be great if users could configure the idType on a per-collection basis

• it would help with incremental adoption of this new feature
• serial id's and uuid's have slightly different use cases, each offering benefits - it'd be nice to get the best of both worlds

this request might introduce some complexity given @payloadcms/db-mongodb doesn't support the new idType arg, therefore it would need to be conditionally supported in the collection config or coincide with support for idType for MongoDB

opening for consideration 🙏🏼

[DanRibbens]

This could be done now with some creativity.

Leave the id type alone so the serial IDs are the default.

When you need a UUID id type add your own id field:
name: 'id', type: 'text', admin:{ hidden: true }

Then with a before change hook on the field you can generate return and return a UUID. It is going to be a varchar field in the db, but functionally it is the same.

[JPrisk]

thanks for the reply @DanRibbens, I had a thought to do something similar - guess the api would still use id as a primary key which is what i'd be trying to avoid (as to not expose sensitive data)

[DanRibbens]

@JPrisk,
Right, id will always be the PK. For UUIDs, whether they are generated from Payload or the database itself, would make non-guessable ids for you either way.

If your security is reliant on ids not being serial, your data can't be that sensitive or you need to come up with other measures besides security through obscurity.

[JPrisk]

That is very true, obscure id's shouldn't be the only security measure for sensitive data. I can think of a few use cases where exposing the number of entries could inadvertently tell a user about the volume of data in a system.

Regardless, like you mentioned there are ways around this currently - the aim was to raise for consideration, if you don't think it is roadmap worthy feel free to close it out

[JPrisk]

on second look I see what you mean, 🤦‍♂️ helps if you read the docs https://payloadcms.com/docs/fields/overview#customizable-id

An explicit id field can be declared in the fields array to override this behavior

got it! closing this one out as a learning opportunity... 😂 thanks @DanRibbens