Sharing URL generation from uuid4?

Question

I'm having a bit of a problem figuring out how to generate user friendly links to products for sharing.

I'm currently using /product/{uuid4_of_said_product} Which is working quite fine - but it's a bit user unfriendly - it's kind of long and ugly.

And I do not wish to use and id as it would allow users to "guess" products. Not that that is too much of an issue - I would like to avoid it.

Do you have any hints on how to generate unique, user friendly, short sharing urls based on the unique item id or uuid?

Try doing a search for base62 encoder/decoder libraries. Still guessable but much shorter. — Selcuk
– Selcuk, Commented Jun 1, 2016 at 12:41
Greetings raphv - yes slugs are not a possibility as the items in question do not have a title/name or anything that can be slugified. I apologize for forgetting to mention this from the get go. I will look into those Selcuk - thanks. I did not think of investigation a simple base 64 encode. Silly me. — Boris Gaganelov
– Boris Gaganelov, Commented Jun 1, 2016 at 14:09

dextraz · Accepted Answer · 2016-06-02 02:57:31Z

1

answered Jun 2, 2016 at 2:57

dextraz

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Comments

Boris Gaganelov · Accepted Answer · 2016-06-06 07:17:51Z

1

As Seluck suggested I decided to go with base64 encoding and decoding:

In the model my "link" property is now built from the standard url + base64.urlsafe_b64encode(str(media_id))

The url pattern I use to match the base64 pattern:

base64_pattern = r'(?:[A-Za-z0-9+/]{4})*(?:[A-Za-z0-9+/]{2}==|[A-Za-z0-9+/]{3}=)?$'

And finally in the view we decode the id to load the proper data: media_id = base64.urlsafe_b64decode(str(media_id))

media = Media.objects.get(pk=media_id)

answered Jun 6, 2016 at 7:17

Boris Gaganelov

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