UUID Tools

Generate unique identifiers for your workflow data.

Overview

The UUID Tools connector is a built-in utility for generating and validating unique identifiers inside a workflow. It supports the common formats: classic UUIDs (v4), time-ordered UUIDs (v7), ULIDs, NanoIDs, plus a custom generator for project-specific id schemes.

Use it whenever a workflow needs to mint an identifier that doesn't come from an external system - a correlation ID to thread across systems, a primary key for a record being written to MongoDB, a short ID for a webhook URL, or an idempotency key for a Stripe or NetSuite call.

What You Can Do

The UUID connector exposes these tools:

• generate - Generate a UUID v4 (random).
• generate-v7 - Generate a UUID v7 (time-ordered, sortable, recommended for new IDs).
• nanoid - Generate a NanoID (short, URL-safe, configurable length).
• ulid - Generate a ULID (time-ordered, Crockford base32).
• ulid-timestamp - Extract the millisecond timestamp from a ULID.
• custom - Generate an ID from a custom alphabet and length.
• parse - Parse a UUID string into its components (version, variant, etc.).
• validate - Check that a string is a syntactically valid UUID.

Authentication and Setup

No connection or authentication is required. These tools are built into the platform and available in every workflow by default - just drop a Connector node onto the canvas and pick the tool you need.

Using in a Workflow

Add a Connector node, select UUID Tools, and pick a mode:

• Direct Mode - The default. Generation is a single deterministic call; pass the result to whatever node needs the ID.
• Agent Mode - Not useful here; ID generation is too cheap to justify the agent loop.

For idempotency keys on writes to Stripe, NetSuite, or other systems with at-least-once retry semantics, generate the key once at the top of the workflow and reuse it across retries.

Tips

• Prefer UUID v7 for new IDs - it's time-ordered, which keeps database indexes happy and makes IDs sortable by creation time.
• Use NanoID for user-facing IDs - they're shorter than UUIDs and still collision-safe at typical scales.
• ULIDs are good for timestamped events - ulid-timestamp lets you recover the creation time from the ID alone.
• Generate idempotency keys early and store them in a variable so retries reuse the same key, not a fresh one.

Common Pitfalls

• UUID v4 hurts B-tree indexes - Inserting random UUIDs into a primary-key column scatters writes across the index. Use v7 or ULID for new tables.
• Custom alphabets and collision risk - Short IDs from custom can collide. Use NanoID with a sensible length unless you have a hard reason to roll your own.
• Validation accepts any version - validate doesn't enforce a specific UUID version. Use parse and check the version field if it matters.
• IDs are not secrets - UUIDs and NanoIDs are unguessable but not authentication tokens. Use a real secret for anything sensitive.

Common Use Cases

• Handle Errors and Build Fallback Workflows
• Archive Workflow Data to a Database
• Build a Webhook-Triggered Order Processing Workflow
• Build a Reusable Subworkflow Library

Related Articles

• Adding a New Connection
• Date & Time Tools
• Encoding Tools
• Validation Tools
• Code Runner

For technical API details and field specifications, see the UUID Tools documentation.