Is it Legitimate to Parse Legacy Numeric Identifiers Out of Global IDs (GIDs)?

New GraphQL Product APIs
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Context

Anatomy of a GraphQL ID states the following:

GraphQL ID generation is implementation dependent, and doesn’t follow any convention other than being a URI. There is no guarantee that GraphQL IDs will follow the structure gid://shopify/{resource}/{rest_id} as in the previous example, so you shouldn’t generate IDs programmatically. Always treat the admin_graphql_api_id string as an opaque ID.

I just migrated my organization’s app from the REST API to the GraphQL API. I was not entirely certain that all of the code would support GIDs, so to expedite the process, I requested legacyResourceId, where available, and, against the advice of the aforementioned document, constructed GIDs for certain types (largely just Customer, Order) when using them in a query. So far, I have not observed any adverse consequences to doing so.

I have noticed that there is documentation on GIDs that describes their structure in more detail than I would expect for an identifier that should be considered opaque.

Searching this forum, I also discovered that in at least one instance, parsing GIDs to get the underlying legacy/numeric/REST ID was the official recommendation to address a problem.

Question

Is it legitimate to parse the numeric ID out of a GID? Conversely, is it likely to be a problem if we continue to construct GIDs? The only entity type that is relevant to our app which appears questionable to me is Address, which includes additional parameters in the ID. Fortunately, we do not query for addresses, so we do not construct GIDs for that type.

I suppose I’m really just trying to understand the level of risk we are assuming by continuing to employ this strategy, and I would be grateful if somebody could speak to that.

Thank you!

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Hi @micah,

Specifically for migrating products and variants we have the following guidance on the topic:

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Thank you @Asaf_Gitai. That documentation discusses Product and ProductVariant types, specifically. Can you verify that it is safe to read it as broadly applicable to other types as well?

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I’m pretty certain a lot of people in the community do this, there was actually a Shopify library for this as well. However it has since been deprecated by Shopify but you can see the logic @shopify/admin-graphql-api-utilities - npm

You can always request the legacyResourceId from the GraphQL API, which will be the same as REST.

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The package listed by @JordanFinners is shown as deprecated.
@Asaf_Gitai Will Shopify release newer utility packages like that? Those utilities are very handy. (E.g. when constructing a link to Shopify admin from global id)