One of the more frustrating limitations of vanilla JavaScript is that there is actually no GUID or UUID generator in the language. That\u2019s right, out of the box, you cannot generate a GUID with a nice single line of code! Very annoying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Luckily, there are two ways that I\u2019ve used in the past to generate GUID or GUID-like strings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This first piece of code is one I use in places where the randomness isn\u2019t such a big deal. It might be just generating correlation ids, or just as a way to generate some randomized letters\/numbers, but not global uniqueness and\/or collisions aren\u2019t such a big deal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
generateGuid() : string {\n return 'xxxxxxxx-xxxx-4xxx-yxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx'.replace(\/[xy]\/g, function(c) {\n var r = Math.random() * 16 | 0,\n v = c == 'x' ? r : (r & 0x3 | 0x8);\n return v.toString(16);\n });\n}<\/code><\/pre>\n\n\n\nIn most cases where I\u2019m generating a GUID on the front end, I\u2019m not worried too much about how secure things are. You shouldn\u2019t be too concerned on collisions in the browser anyway because a user could just as easily inject JavaScript and\/or modify an API call that uses the GUID into using their own string.<\/p>\n\n\n\n