PublicIds

PublicIds is a concept in software development that refers to identifiers that are exposed or visible to external systems or users. These identifiers are typically used for referencing specific resources or entities within an application or a set of interconnected applications. Unlike internal IDs, which might be database primary keys or temporary internal references, PublicIds are designed to be stable, opaque, and safe to share.

The primary purpose of PublicIds is to decouple internal data structures from external interfaces. By using PublicIds, an application can change its internal database schema or identifier strategy without affecting any external systems that rely on those identifiers. This promotes flexibility and maintainability. PublicIds are often generated in a way that makes them difficult to guess or infer based on the internal structure of the system, enhancing security.

Common implementations of PublicIds include Universally Unique Identifiers (UUIDs) or similar globally unique, randomly generated strings. These are often preferred because they are virtually guaranteed to be unique across different systems and do not reveal any information about the data they represent, such as creation order or internal database relationships. When creating or retrieving resources, an application might present a PublicId to the client and expect that same PublicId to be used in subsequent requests to interact with that resource. This abstraction is a key pattern in many modern API designs.