Feature Request: return UUID in canonical form (no hyphens)

4D v12 has a new function Generate UUID1 This is a much welcome feature, but fails to return an UUID in canonical (with hyphens) form like everyone else2.

It would appear that 4D has UUIDs for everything it stores internally3. 4D has no comment on why it has chosen to have Generate UUID return a UUID without hyphens.

Further, in v12 using the “UUID format” on an alpha field removes the capability to set the length of said field. If I copy a UUID with hyphens, it strips them out to save them to 32 length string.

4D says there is no benefit, other than convenience, from having an UUID field and a 36 char alpha field with a trigger that stores UUID via Generate UUID into it.

Finally, the documentation says to refer to the design reference manual for v12 for more information. Which isn’t out as of the time of this writing.

A decade in reflection

note: revisiting this feature request nearly 15 years years later is surreal. Good news. 4D now returns either in canonical and non-canonical forms.

The word of software has moved forward tremendously in 15 years and I think documentation and forums have benefitted the most? Maybe? I suppose “It’ll go on the backlog..” has its own special place.

Don’t worry 4D, you still hold a special place in my heart.

Author’s Note

Initial md Generated using https://github.com/jsr6720/wordpress-html-scraper-to-md

Original Wordpress categories: [‘Wish List’]

Original Wordpress tags: “Wish List”, “4D”, “UUID”

Original Wordpress comments: None

Significant revisions

tags: 2010, txcowboycoder, feature-request, 4D

  • May 24th, 2024 Picked this one post to modernize for funzies. One of my earliest aspirations was to influence the future of a major software product that I had to use everyday at work.
  • May 7th, 2024 Converted to jekyll markdown format and copied to personal site
  • Oct 26th, 2010 Originally published on txcowboycoder wordpress site

EOF/Footnotes

  1. New link 4Dv20R5 Generate UUID ↩

  2. Ah yes. Everyone which I’m guessing I meant postgreSQL? ↩

  3. As identified by doing a structure export as xml ↩