Friday, July 31, 2009

HOWTO: Generate GUID from PeopleCode

A few months ago I demonstrated a handful of ways to Base64 encode strings — none of them were delivered. That post generated some outstanding feedback. Customers, consultants, and Oracle employees pointed me at several other alternatives, including the delivered Pluggable Encryption technique documented in PeopleBooks. I hope this post generates the same amount of discussion.

First, why would a PeopleSoft developer generate a GUID? My motivation is a database cache. I have a transaction that inserts information into a cache Record and an IScript that reads values from that cache. Rather than pass transaction keys to the IScript, I just pass a GUID that identifies the transaction's row in the cache. Besides decoupling the IScript from a transaction, it provides a bit of security through obfuscation (see OWASP Top 10 2007-Insecure Direct Object Reference)

Now, how to generate a GUID from PeopleCode... PeopleBooks does not list any GUID generation functions, so the next place to look for this functionality is in related technologies accessible to PeopleCode. For example, the Oracle database provides the SYS_GUID function for generating GUID's in the RAW. Here is the SYS_GUID function in action:

Local string &guid;
SQLExec("SELECT RAWTOHEX(SYS_GUID()) FROM PS_INSTALLATION", &guid);
MessageBox(0, "", 0, 0, "GUID from DB: " | &guid);

If you are just looking for a random string, then read no further. If you want a formatted GUID, then you will need to add the dashes yourself. Microsoft SQL Server has a similar function that actually returns a fully formatted plain text GUID.

The problem with these SQL alternatives is that they are database specific. I'm not going to complain about a user taking full advantage of the database's features. But, if there is an alternative that may reduce future maintenance costs (like the cost of swtiching from one database to another), then I'll consider the low cost alternative.

Since all PeopleSoft application servers run Java, we can use the JRE's GUID methods to generate a GUID. If you are on PeopleTools 8.49 with Java 1.5, then this short PeopleCode snippet will give you a fully formatted GUID:

GetJavaClass("java.util.UUID").randomUUID().toString();

On my laptop, the code above generated d65ca460-fc93-4420-a889-8b36311ee4a0.

What if you are using an older version of PeopleTools (prior to 8.49)? The Apache commons id project has a UUID Java class that is similar to the delivered Java 1.5 UUID class. For more information about Java GUID generation, see this java.util.UUID mini-FAQ.

Who knows, if you dig through your application's PeopleCode, you might find an undocumented method for generating GUID's ;)