Enhancing Rodauth with Custom Binary + ULID Type Support for Improved ID Management

[ukmshi]

Background

I am currently developing a Rails application using MySQL with Binary + ULID for managing IDs. I would like to manage the tables required by rodauth in the same manner, using Binary + ULID for the table IDs.

Problem

In rodauth, the design assumes that the account_id is the same for both reading and writing operations. This assumption is not suitable for cases where a conversion is desired between reads and writes, such as with Binary types. Using Binary as the ID directly leads to errors in transformations, such as when generating JWTs.

Suggestion

In Rails, it is possible to declare a custom type using ActiveRecord::Type and alter the processing for reads and writes from the database, as shown below:

class ULIDType < ActiveRecord::Type::Binary
  # Convert value before writing to the database (here, the value is returned as is because no conversion is necessary)
  def cast(value)
    value
  end
  
  # Convert the database read value to a Ruby object
  def deserialize(value)
    raw_value = super(value) # Retrieve the binary data from the database
    return if raw_value.nil?

    Utils::Ulid.binary_to_ulid_string(raw_value.to_s)
  end

  # Convert the Ruby object to a format that can be saved in the database
  def serialize(value)
    return if value.nil?

    raw_value = Utils::Ulid.string_to_ulid_byte(value)
    super(raw_value)
  end
end

ActiveRecord::Type.register(:ulid, ULIDType)

If rodauth could declare its own type in a similar way and allow users to customize it, I believe it could become even more popular. Should this feature be added to rodauth, or more appropriately, to Sequel? What are your thoughts on this proposal?