Hi TRS-80,

Your approach should work just fine. So fine, in fact, that it's already kind of built in! Configure org-id-method and set it to 'ts and you'll get timestamps as ID instead of uuid.

I do believe the manual lacks a description for this. Not entirely sure though, and can't check atm. But the configuration is there none the less, and supported.

Kind regards
Gustav
From: Emacs-orgmode <emacs-orgmode-bounces+gustav=whil.se@gnu.org> on behalf of TRS-80 <trs-80@isnotmyreal.name>
Sent: Thursday, September 10, 2020 10:02:45 PM
To: emacs-orgmode@gnu.org <emacs-orgmode@gnu.org>
Subject: Any reason not to generate my own custom ID value (NOT CUSTOM_ID)?
 
First, I want to express my sincere and heart-felt gratitude to Carsten
(and other contributors) for making and sharing this wonderful piece of
software.  I have come to refer to it as "one of the gateway drugs to
Emacs" (the other being Magit, IMHO).  It was certainly one of (if not
/the/) main reason(s) why I started using Emacs initially.

I could in fact gush all day, however people are busy, so, on to the
main issue...  :)

It seems to me that there is nothing really stopping me from inserting
whatever value I like for value of "ID" Property.  Based on brief
experimentation, org-store-link and org-insert-link seem to happily
accept whatever value is already there (which I entered manually, for
testing purposes).

However I seem to recall reading some warning somewhere about this,
although I cannot seem to find it right now.

What I would like to do, is generate my own ID values in a more human
readable format, something "ISO-like" for example "2020-09-10-1433" (as
opposed to the default "uuid" method).  These sort of ID are still
"Unique" (well, within my own system, anyway) as long as I am not
generating them more often than once per minute[0].  And they have the
advantages of being shorter, human readable, and meaningful.

Even when org-id-link-to-org-use-id and org-id-track-globally are both
set to "t", org-id seems happy to insert my "ISO-like" ID right into the
hash table and org-id-locations-file.

I do need the "across files" functionality.  My understanding is that
this is main difference between ID and CUSTOM_ID (the latter being local
only to the file).  Unless I am misunderstanding?

So, what am I missing here?  Any reason(s) /not/ to use my own custom ID
value?

In addition to the general case, one particular area I am unsure about
(as I have yet to get it working) is how this all works out with HTML
export, as that is something I also wanted to get working at some point.

I tried studying some of the related sources (as well as mailing list
archive), but could not seem to reach a conclusive answer.  I was hoping
that some more knowledgeable people could confirm
whether this is a really bad idea, or not.  Any feedback would be
greatly appreciated!

Cheers!

TRS-80

[0] It could easily be extended to second (or further) resolution, if
needed.  For me, minute resolution will be fine.