Uniquely identify set entries

Support
1

I have a Tree model that’s a list of document groups/categories. One of the subfields is a Set, which contains the documents inside the group. What I want is a page that lists all the groups, each with a list of the documents it contains as links to view the document on another page. Further, I need the document links to be permalinks, as they’ll also be posted elsewhere.

Building it, everything was going great until I hit the document links. It seems Set entries don’t have their own _id nor any other way that I can see to reliably identify a particular Set entry from its peers (given array position is mutable). Without that, I’m not sure how to build the links, since I need to pass a parameter to the document page identifying which doc to show.

I guess my first question is: am I missing something? Is there a way to identify Set entries among peers that I overlooked? Maybe a setting I can toggle that would be helpful? Or some other solution?

As a workaround, I think I can add an extra field to the document items to serve as an ID field. It’s a little ugly but would work if I can get it reliably populated. Which leads to these questions:

  • Can I provide some magic dust in an options or meta JSON field on the Set itself, on the items, or on the ID field, that would auto-populate the field with a calculated hash or similar?

  • Reading a bit, it sounds like Cockpit is extensible enough that I can build an addon to do the population, or perhaps to extend the Set field as a new field that includes an _id value. But I have no idea how to get started – I’m just getting started with Cockpit itself, and the docs don’t have anything about addons. I’ve been looking around, but about everything I find is for v1, and I understand v2 was a major update with significant, incompatible changes. I’m very comfortable with PHP, so that’s not a hurdle, but a clean, secure starting point would be extremely helpful.

On a closing note, if I’m not overlooking how to enable an an _id field, I’d like to propose this addition as a feature request. Along with plenty of use cases similar to my immediate one, I suspect this would be extremely helpful in lots of ops use-cases, such as backup or data syncing solutions.

2

As a quick follow-up, I tried to do something like this:

default: crypto.getRandomValues(new Uint32Array(3)).join('')

on a text field, but the editor says the JSON is invalid starting with the ‘c’ in there, and then it tosses the change when I save. In fact, it seems to reject anything other than a simple constant value. I hoped the JSON string was ultimately handed off to the browser as a JavaScript object, but I guess that’s not the way it works.

Any other ideas?

3

I would recommend to create and register a custom field via a custom addon which generates a unique id on init.