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Re: CreateCellID

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg119300] Re: CreateCellID
  • From: John Fultz <jfultz at wolfram.com>
  • Date: Sun, 29 May 2011 07:38:47 -0400 (EDT)

On Wed, 25 May 2011 19:31:28 -0400 (EDT), Wolfgang Windsteiger wrote:
> Dear group,
>
> the CellOption "CellID" is still undocumented, thus unsafe whether it
> will survive future design decisions.
>
> Does anybody have a "feeling", how high the chances are that this very
> useful feature might become documented and thus permanent?
>
> The CellID is "unique", I assume "unique within one notebook" (at least,
> this would sound reasonable for me). Or is it even "unique within all
> open notebooks". Does anyone know how I should interpret "unique"?
>
> Thank you,
> WW.

Whether or not it becomes documented, I think the existing functionality is
unlikely to change in any significant way, as our documentation system relies on
the existing functionality.

Yes, you are correct...CellID is unique within a given notebook.  One of the
important properties of a CellID is that it's saved with the notebook and the ID
for a given cell will never, ever be changed by any automatic operation.  This
allows a stable target for operations such as hyperlinking.  Since ID stability
is an important feature, we couldn't make it unique among a collection of open
notebooks unless it were a genuinely globally unique identifier (e.g., look up
GUID in Wikipedia).

Sincerely,

John Fultz
jfultz at wolfram.com
User Interface Group
Wolfram Research, Inc.


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