amazon web services - UUIDs for DynamoDB?

Question

Is it possible to get DynamoDB to automatically generate unique IDs when adding new items to a table?

I noticed the Java API mentions @DynamoDBAutoGeneratedKey so I'm assuming there's a way to get this working with PHP as well.

If so, does the application code generate these IDs or is it done on the DynamoDB side?

Answer 1

Good question - while conceptually possible, this seems not currently available as a DynamoDB API level feature, insofar neither CreateTable nor PutItem refer to such a functionality.

The @DynamoDBAutoGeneratedKey notation you have noticed is a Java annotation, i.e. syntactic sugar offered by the Java SDK indeed:

An annotation, in the Java computer programming language, is a special form of syntactic metadata that can be added to Java source code.

As such @DynamoDBAutoGeneratedKey is one of the Amazon DynamoDB Annotations offered as part of the Object Persistence Model within the Java SDK's high-level API (see Using the Object Persistence Model with Amazon DynamoDB):

Marks a hash key or range key property as being auto-generated. The Object Persistence Model will generate a random UUID when saving these attributes. Only String properties can be marked as auto-generated keys.