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...@gnu.org> on behalf of TRS-80 <trs...@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.
