Feature Request: Support for Auto-Incrementing Document IDs

[josh4500]

I propose adding a mechanism within Collection to support simple, auto-incrementing integer IDs for documents.

Currently, adding a document to a Collection requires the developer to manually provide a unique String ID. For use cases like local storage of log-like data or traditional list-based models, this is cumbersome. Developers must implement boilerplate code to find the maximum existing ID and increment it, which is both inefficient and prone to race conditions if not handled carefully.

Proposed Solution
Add a new IdGenerationStrategy enum to the add method. When specified, the system will automatically generate and assign a simple, sequential integer ID.

We could have something like this below

Loon.collection<T>(
  ...,
  idGenerationStrategy: IdGenerationStrategy.autoIncrement
);

Motivation came from my working with a SearchQueryModel where the insertion order matters, and I don't need to compute the ID before storing.

[danReynolds]

Thanks for reaching out!

I agree that manually needing to provide an ID for a document isn't always what users want to do and given that this library takes some cues from Cloud Firestore, which supports automatically generating IDs, I have proposed adding that in this change.

Firestore doesn't use auto-incrementing IDs, however, and I would prefer to not do that here either. Is a unique auto-generated String ID like this sufficient for your use case or do you need monotonically increasing ones?

[danReynolds]

Overlooked your point about insertion order mattering. In that case you could put a createdAt or searchedAt field on the search model and then sort the results that way. That would be the convention for document stores like Firestore.

It is true that lots of databases support increasing sequential IDs, but that's not something I think should be baked into document stores like Loon. Another approach would be to use a great library like https://pub.dev/packages/ulid and pass an ID generated from there in as your document ID, since those will be lexicographically sortable and it would be simple to do.

Let me know if either of those sound good

[josh4500]

Thanks for responding. I already implemented as you described. Also, it doesn't have to be in sequence as I've previously said, we could just have an auto id just as in Firestone.

[danReynolds]

Thanks for responding. I already implemented as you described. Also, it doesn't have to be in sequence as I've previously said, we could just have an auto id just as in Firestone.

Yea great, that's what I have in that pull request. I'll move ahead with that!

[danReynolds]

Automatic document ID generation is live in version 5.6.0: https://pub.dev/packages/loon

[josh4500]

Nice