Comments on: Generating element IDs with JavaScript and counters

By: Mike

Mike — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 14:08:25 +0000

I think Flemming is referring to the situation where the same script is running in 2 separate browsers at the same time, communicating the id to a common server as a unique id. In that case, a duplicate is possible, right?

By: Ryan

Ryan — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 23:38:39 +0000

Two different places? Every time it’s called it’s incremented for that visitor. It’s building a page for that user with a unique id so it doesn’t matter if two visitors have the same id.

By: Flemming

Flemming — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 22:37:27 +0000

So what happends if the function is called from two different places at the exact same time?

By: Ryan

Ryan — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 14:09:56 +0000

I didn’t really need it to be unique overall, just unique to the page. So a global counter worked for me. I did actually play with the Date object originally but found it was a little unnecessary for my needs.

Like the idea though. Your code is simpler than what I came up with originally.

By: Fernando

Fernando — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 13:35:48 +0000

Maybe it’s the way to do the same thing you posted before but without bug.. ?

var uniqueCounter=0;
function uid(){
uniqueCounter++;
var newDate = new Date;
return newDate.getTime() + uniqueCounter++;
}