How are shorter GUID user friendly?

Question

I just came accross this blog which uses ShortGuid to create registration validation tokens.

When i tried to open the link which said A shorter and URL friendly Guid it seems that the link redirects to some other link. It opens some other language site.

But I have few questions, How can a shorter Guid be user friendly? And when should I use it?

Answer 1

There is a copy/past benefit as well. If i understand correctly, it is not about nice URLs, but about validation tokens. A lot of people copy/pase codes by double clicking, and then the Sguid (ShortGuid) is indeed more user friendly. Try it:

Xy0MVKupFES9NpmZ9TiHcw

540c2d5f-a9ab-4414-bd36-9999f5388773

Answer 2

How can a shorter Guid be user friendly?

If your users type in URLs by hand instead of clicking links, so not very likely.

And when should I use it?

All characters in a GUID (A-F, 0-9, -) are URL-safe, so 'safety' isn't really an argument.

You may want to consider it for aesthetical reasons, or for ease of copy-pasting the URL.

Answer 3

Guid's are generally expressed in base-16 (using 0-9 and A-F). This makes the strings long. The same amount of data can be expressed in a shorter string if you use more characters (0-9, a-z, A-Z, and other special characters like _ or @).

While they dont make a difference to your code at all, long GUIDs are ugly looking to have in URLs or anything a user might see so you can convert them to a shorter format that is still not very pretty but takes up less space.

Somebody might argue that the shorter format requires less bandwidth but the practical savings are negligible.

Answer 4

How can a shorter Guid be user friendly?

You answered your own question, in the question. It's pretty obvious: 7A9D35A3 (shorter) is much easier to remember/type than 7A9D35A3-4999-4130-8E2B-EB0447D942FA.

And when should I use it?

An example would be to use it as a reference. Some examples:

• "An error has occurred, please contact support. Reference: 7A9D35A3"
• "Your booking was confirmed! Booking code: 7A9D35A3"

Answer 5

What about using a db table to map ID with GUID. Something like

ID      GUID
1000    540c2d5f-a9ab-4414-bd36-9999f5388773
1001    123c2d5f-a9ab-4414-bd36-9999f5388773
1002    567c2d5f-a9ab-4414-bd36-9999f5388773

It would be much easier to scale or migrate then using ID in each db table, and you end up with a clean ID.