Primary Keys and CouchDB

Question

CouchDB's versioning is an absolute boon to the application I'm writing, but each of the objects I want to represent in the database has it's own unique identifier (let's call it my_id), so I don't really need the _id field.

Is there a way for me to tell CouchDB that I want to make my field the primary hey (not _id)?

I'm using ruby's couchrest_model, so I know I can do Model.find_by_my_id(params[:my_id]) if I've put view_by :my_id in my class, but this feels like I'm storing an _id for no purpose. Should I care?

Answer 1

would it not be possible to, when you create the document, provide your own id instead of the default one couchb assigns? I don't know if ruby's couchrest can do it, but it's available in the CouchDB API

See here: http://wiki.apache.org/couchdb/HTTP_Document_API#PUT

The document ID is passed into the url.