[Kwpolska]

Some commenters mentioned that the GraphQL API exposes the database IDs and a URL to the object directly in the schema. But the author did not know that and instead reverse-engineered the ID generation logic.

This is one of many reasons why GraphQL sucks. Developers will do anything to avoid reading docs. In the REST API, the developerId and url fields would be easily discoverable by looking at the API response. But in GraphQL, there is no way to get all fields. You need to get a list of fields from the docs and request them explicitly.

[ldjb]

The author may well have been aware of this. However, since the author didn't retrieve those database IDs or URLs in the first place, they would have had to make further requests to retrieve them, which they wanted to avoid doing.

"I was looking at either backfilling millions of records or migrating our entire database, and neither sounded fun."