Data API - Add a non-changing unique identifier

Hello - For the Data API, can you add a non-changing ID to each record? Such as the PR# or any other unique id?

I’m writing a script that is analyzing the links, which comes at an expensive cost. I would like the links to only be analyzed once. It would be helpful if each record had some internal ID we could reference when updating or aggregating additional data.

For example:

data: [
{
   id: 1, // <-- Add this, keep it consistent across all data api updates ❗
   links: [
      "https://twitter.com/courtenay_roche/status/1267653137969623040",
      "https://twitter.com/yagirlbrookie09/status/1267647898365427714",
      "https://www.4029tv.com/article/bentonville-police-deploy-tear-gas-on-protesters/32736629#"
   ],
   state: "Arkansas",
   edit_at: "https://github.com/2020PB/police-brutality/blob/master/reports/Arkansas.md",
   city: "Bentonville",
   name: "Law enforcement gas a crowd chanting “we want peace” right after exiting the building.",
   date: "2020-06-01",
   date_text: "June 1st"
},

Much appreciated. Thanks for the wonderful contribution.

[colegleason]

Could the new issue template include a link to https://www.uuidgenerator.net/ and ask the contributor to paste one in?

[bonedaddy]

@ubershmekel – it should be super easy for the end-user adding the ID. In this case, we’ll just need to worry about collisions (duplicate IDs). Realistically this is a problem for thousands of records. If this is hundreds of records, it might not be as risky.

Using the ID of a PR seems like the easiest option, as its pretty simple for anyone adding a new PR to do. If a UUID is being used, ksuid is pretty cool, as it can be sorted based on time.