There are a bunch of ways you can do it. As a previous poster said, you can
take 10 digits of the current timestamp. However, be wary of daylight saving
time changes (if you have them on your server), and the possibility of any
conflict if you change servers, have a backup server, or ever expand to
multiple servers for your application.
A possibility, if you're open to alphanumeric strings, is a uuid, specifically
uuid4 or uuid1. Check out the documentation to see if they'd work for you. If
you don't care to necessarily limit it to 10 characters, and you don't mind
alpha-numeric characters, then just use a uuid4 and you're done.
http://docs.python.org/library/uuid.html
Yet another possibility is to use the capability of your database to create
sequences. If you're using Postgres, it has a SEQUENCE which you can create,
and always ask it for the next one. You can start a sequence at any number you
like, in order to get the size you want. We do something similar for generating
customer numbers. We have a sequence, and we use it appended to a static set of
digits for the particular program the customer is in. So, for example, all
customers in program X would have a customer number of 10 digits starting with
'1001' and ending with an incremental number. There are ways to do this with
other databases. Worst-case you can create a table with an auto-increment key
and just use its primary key for your next digit.
One more, but not last nor least, is to have your model generate the string you
want by one of the means above, or something completely different, then
override the save() of your model to check to ensure that this key doesn't
exist already. This is less than ideal, but maybe there's a case to be made for
it. Just throwing it in as an option.
Shawn
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