1. ASCII table sequentially lists digits and alphabets e.g. ASCII code of 0 to 9 are ranging from 48 to 57. So I can use this sequential ASCII coding and convert them to Java Characters. Benefit, of course I can get rid of any array of predefined characters in my code.
2. I want to add current time to this "randomness", so need to initialize the seed of Java Random object with current timestamp. So every time I execute this, I can make sure it will be something different than previous instance.
3. As I already explained, it will be alphanumeric based, so I'll exclude special characters and thus, total number of valid ASCII chars left for me is 62 ( 0-9, A-Z, a-z ).
Now, let's see how the Java code looks like. Please let me know how random is this or any better approach :-) Cheers....
/**
* It will generate ID- 16 digit ID
* ASCII Table
* 0-9 - ASCII code 48-57
* A-Z - ASCII code 65-90
* a-z - ASCII code 97-122
* Total: 62
* @return
*/
private String generateRandomID(){
final int ID_SIZE = 16;
final int NUM_OF_CHARS = 62;
StringBuffer id = new StringBuffer();
long now = new Date().getTime();
// Set the new Seed as current timestamp
Random r = new Random(now);
int index = 0;
int x = 0;
while(x < ID_SIZE){
index = r.nextInt(NUM_OF_CHARS);
System.out.println("Index="+ index);
if(index < 10){
id.append((char)(48 + index));
}
else if(10 <= index && index <36){
index = index - 10;
id.append((char)(65 + index));
}else{
index = index - 36;
id.append((char)(97 + index));
}
x++;
}
return id.toString();
}