Designing APIs for humans: Object IDs 🧑🏻‍💻

Ever wondered why Stripe uses foloowing format to generate unique IDs? Let’s dive in and break down how and why Stripe IDs are structured the way they are:

pi_3LKQhvGUcADgqoEM3bh6pslE
└┘└────────────┘
└─ Prefix └─ Randomly generated characters


You might have noticed that all Stripe Objects have a prefix at the beginning of the ID. The reason for this is quite simple: adding a prefix makes the ID human readable. ✔️

Without knowing anything else about the ID we can immediately confirm that we’re talking about a PaymentIntent object here, thanks to the pi_ prefix. This helps Stripe employees internally just as much as it helps developers integrating with Stripe.

$pi = $stripe->paymentIntents->retrieve(
  $id,
  [],
  ['stripe_account' => 'cus_1KrJdMGUcADgqoEM']
);

The above snippet is trying to retrieve a PaymentIntent from a connected account, however without even looking at the code you can immediately spot the error: a Customer ID (cus_) is being used instead of an Account ID (acct_). 🔖

Without prefixes this would be much harder to debug; if Stripe used UUIDs instead then we’d have to look up the ID to find out what kind of object it is and if it’s even valid. 👨‍💻


[ Read More ] : https://dev.to/stripe/designing-apis-for-humans-object-ids-3o5a

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#UUID #Stripe
@ProgrammingTip