Here's a method of combining a counter with the current time to allow you to have as many as 1000 separate transactions within the same ms that are all uniquely numbered, but still a time-based value.
And, here's a working snippet to illustrate:
// this guarantees a unique time-based id
// as long as you don't have more than 1000
// requests in the same ms
var getTransactionID = (function() {
var lastTime, counter = 0;
return function() {
var now = Date.now();
if (now !== lastTime) {
lastTime = now;
counter = 0;
} else {
++counter;
}
return (now * 1000) + counter;
}
})();
for (var i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
document.write(getTransactionID() + "<br>");
}
If you want something that is likely to work across clusters, you can use process.hrtime()
to use the high resolution timer instead of the counter and then make the id be a string that could be parsed into a relative time if needed. Since this requires node.js, I can't make a working snippet here in the browser, but here's the idea:
// this makes a unique time-based id
function getTransactionID () {
var now = Date.now();
var hrtime = process.hrtime();
return now + "." + ((hrtime[0] * 1e9) + hrtime[1]);
}