Generating unique row ID ints.

[Simon Wittber]

I'm building a web application using sqlalchemy in my db layer.

Some of the tables require single integer primary keys which might be
exposed in some parts of the web interface. If users can guess the next
key in a sequence, it might be possible for them to 'game' or
manipulate the system in unexpected ways. I want to avoid this by
generating a random key for each row ID, and have decided to use the
same approach for all my single key tables.

Are there any best practices for implementing this?

If the random module is suitable, does anyone have any good ideas on
how this could be implemented?

Some questions which came to mind are:
    Would I need to save and restore the random module state when
generating id's for each table?
    What would be an appropriate seed?
    How many random integers can I generate before a repeat becomes
probable?

I've got my own ideas for implementing this, but am interested to see
how/if anyone else has tackled the same problem.


-Sw.