MGupton620339 (Community Member) asked a question.
Is there a unique identifier for findings?
I'm pulling findings using the REST APIs and I need a unique identifier to globally identify findings. My initial thought was I could use a combination of the app GUID and the issue id, but I was thinking that if one issue is resolved and another one is detected the issue id could be reused. Is that how issue ids work? Alternatively, I was thinking I could get a string representation of the whole finding and use the hash as unique identifier.
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Hello @MGupton620339 (Community Member),
For this type of inquiry, I would recommend you contact our technical support team. Please give any examples that you have tried with the REST API and any other information that could assist the Integrations Engineer in answering your question.
Here's how you can log a case:
Jason
Veracode Support Engineer
The behavior of issue IDs can vary depending on the specific application or system you are working with. In general, issue IDs should be unique within a specific project or system, but it is possible for IDs to be reused if an issue is resolved and then a new issue is created.
If you need a globally unique identifier for findings that persists across time, it may be better to use a combination of the app GUID and a unique identifier that you generate yourself. This could be a UUID or other unique identifier that you generate and associate with each finding.
Alternatively, as you suggested, you could generate a unique identifier by hashing the content of the finding itself. This could work well as long as the content of the finding is unique and stable over time. If the content of the finding changes, even slightly, the hash value will also change, so you should ensure that any updates to the finding's content do not affect the uniqueness of the identifier.
In any case, it's important to ensure that the unique identifier you choose is stable over time and can be used to identify the same finding consistently. This will allow you to use the identifier to track findings over time and to correlate findings across different systems or applications.