UUIDs In Swift Tutorial

Let’s learn how to make UUIDs in Swift.

UUIDs in Swift

UUID stands for a universally unique identifier. Its guaranteed to be unique across all devices in the world.

This is great when you need to reference something individually and not have to worry if it’s unique.

Printing A UUID

In swift, we can create simply be using the UUID() call:

import Foundation

let uuid = UUID().uuidString
print(uuid)

This will print:

F3E2169B-EB75-4DA4-81FD-A9E5C863DA63

Of course what prints to your console will be different, because they’re unique of course!

Class With UUID Property

Adding UUID as a property to a class can be a great idea. This allows you to uniquely identify each object.

import Foundation

class Person {
    let uuid = UUID().uuidString
    var firstName: String?
    var lastName: String?
    var age: Int?
}

Best Use Cases For UUID

UUIDs are universally unique identifiers. So they’re especially useful when data will be shared across multiple databases and many different applications.

This ensures that the objects will remain unique, no matter what environment or setup they’re accessed from.

If you think your application will scale to a large amount of objects, UUIDs can be a good choice.

When Not To Use Cases For UUID

Single Database

If your application writes and reads from a single database, a UUID is not necessary and can decrease the performance of your database greatly.

During inserts, an integer ID may be preferred to a UUID.

There’s already a key

Let’s say you have student objects. If each of these student objects already have a unique student id assigned by the school, there is no reason to use another identifier such as a UUID.

This will add unnecessary complexity to your app and is a poor design choice.

ID Will Be Presented To The End User

If you are going to present the ID to the end user, such as on their profile page or another page, UUID is not a good idea.

Just look at F3E2169B-EB75-4DA4-81FD-A9E5C863DA63. It’s not very readable and it would be much more suitable to give the user a 3 or 6 digit id number instead.

UUID is collision free

UUIDs are standardized by the Open Software Foundation. The Internet Engineering Task Force published the standard as RFC 4122.

The probability of a collision within 103 trillion version-4 UUIDs is one in a billion. This is extremely rare, but there is a non-zero chance.

Version 4 of the UUID standard is generated using random numbers and is the current recommended version.

Alternatives to UUID

Of course if there’s already a logical key, such as a staff number or driver’s license number, use that instead.

Incremental integers can be used if the objects will be limited in scope and only be read/write by one database. You can simply assign 1, to the first object, 2 to the second and so on.

ULID - Universally Unique Lexicographically Sortable Identifier, is a new proposed identifier. Read more here

You should be aware of the security concerns, collision probability and performance of any alternatives.