Creating Meteor-friendly id's in Mongo?

Question

In meteor, when I create an item in a collection, the generated id for the item usually looks like:

"_id" : "vxqbpic8yLdc6Ehor"

However, when I insert a row directly in Mongo, it's generated id looks like:

"_id" : ObjectId("549af35926cee46520611838")

Is there a way for me to insert data directly into mongo generating an id similar to the way meteor does, or is that something special with meteor? I'd be happy with just dropping the "ObjectId()" wrap around the value, if that's possible.

Answer 1

What meteor actually does is create a random 17 character string that consists of characters from within 23456789ABCDEFGHJKLMNPQRSTWXYZabcdefghijkmnopqrstuvwxyz

https://github.com/meteor/meteor/blob/devel/packages/random/random.js is what does that. Namely the RandomGenerator.prototype.id(17) function.

So you can include that in your custom code or any other piece of code that generates 17 character random strings from those characters I've given above, and use its outcome as your ID.

In fact, any other random string would suffice, as long as it is universally random, which Meteor's implementation tries to attain.