TypedIds - A Typed ID Generator for .NET

It's often a good idea to avoid using primitives directly as your entity IDs (string, Guid, etc), because it's easy to get ID values confused, and for bugs to creep in accidentally.

To get round this you'd often have to create custom wrapper types every time you want a new Typed ID, which can be a pain.

TypedIds helps you avoid that by automatically generating typed IDs for you!

TypedIds is built as a .NET Roslyn Source Generator; you'll need to be running the .NET 5 SDK and the latest Visual Studio version.

Using It

Fairly straightforward; add a reference to the TypedIds NuGet package, then define a struct and add the TypedId attribute:

// It's important that it's partial so we can add to it!
[TypedId]
public partial struct AccountId
{
}

public class Program
{
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        // Create a new unique ID.
        var accId = AccountId.New();

        // Outputs: 57f59c84b5924c88af544ba1091104b5 (or your unique value)
        Console.WriteLine(accId.ToString());
    }
}

When you add that TypedId attribute, we generate the implementation of your typed ID (which defaults to being backed by a GUID), with standard equality operators, plus methods to parse identifiers from strings and access the underlying ID if required.

The code it generates should show up in Solution Explorer, under Project -> Analyzers -> TypedIds -> TypedIds.Generator.

Customise the Backing Type

By default TypedIds uses a Guid as its backing value type. However, you can customise the type we store quite easily by passing parameters to the TypedId attribute:

// Backed by a 32-bit int
[TypedId(IdBackingType.Int)]
public partial struct IntId
{
}

// Backed by a 64-bit long
[TypedId(IdBackingType.Long)]
public partial struct LongId
{
}

// Backed by a string
[TypedId(IdBackingType.String)]
public partial struct StringId
{
}

Support for Serialisers

TypedIds automatically adds a TypeConverter implementation, so your IDs should already "just work" in a variety of typical conversion situations, including ASP.NET Core model binding.

Additionally, we also currently support the following serialisers/converters. If the relevant library is referenced in your project, we'll generate the serialisers automatically for you:

Format	Referenced Library
BSON (MongoDB)	MongoDB.Bson
JSON	Newtonsoft.Json
JSON	.NET5+

Planned Features

• Built in serialiser support for:
  • Entity Framework
  • More?

Feel free to raise issues for any additional converters you want.