dhis2-devs team mailing list archive

[Bob Jolliffe <bobjolliffe@xxxxxxxxx>]

I agree depending on the uniqueness of names is not a good idea.  I
saw John said that facilities in India do have codes - the 16 digit
ones which are built hierarchicly (is that a word?).

Is it possible to for a patient id to continue this hierarchy so that
a patient might have say a 6-8 digit local identifier - preferably
Base30 as I see Saptarshi has just chimed in.  But his
"fully-qualified" id would be the 16 digit one + the local part.  I
can see that generation and allocation of these might be problematic
and the internal uuid might be a good (if expensive) failsafe.  How
does openmrs deal with this?  Saptarshi, is at as you have suggested?
I would be a bit concerned that management of a pool of ids strikes me
as something which could easily fall apart.  Isn't it better to
generate them on demand from some random source and test for
uniqueness before inserting into the database?  If its not unique then
it simply tries another till its happy?

Bob


2010/3/4 Lars Helge Øverland <larshelge@xxxxxxxxx>:
>
>
> Been chatting a bit with John and he expressed concern about the
> orgunit-randomnumber apprach. In India there are multiple installations and
> one cannot know for sure that an orgunit name will be unique. How do we deal
> with this?
> Using a globally unique identifier could be a solution, but the standard
> Java implementation (UUID) uses 32 characters and is a bit long. Is
> implementing our own, shorter one an option?
>
> Lars
>
>