Please help me argue my point.
I am working on a website project with a team of developers, we are developing the system in 3 parts. The one part is the API, 2 back-end and front-end. Both the front end and back-end gets and stores data by sending it to the API.
I am specifically responsible for the front end. I am using Codeigniter as my framework.
A little background: The app is a sports betting site.
This is the problem: The developers of the API use the name of for example a tournament or fixture or sport to do the lookup, I pass the name of a tournament for example: www.example.com/sport/add_bet/{tournament_name}
The problem I have with this is that the tournament name as entered into the system by humans might have characters such as spaces, forward slashes, etc in the name.
As you can imagine using a forward slash in the url will completely break the system, since we use them to call different controllers, actions and to pass variables.
I am trying to get them to change to using a simple primary key id field, to perform the lookup of the data. For some reason these developers don't want to do this.
The project manager that manages this project (not a programmer and no experience of programming) had a chat to them about this issue, but still they don't want to change, and they told her that it is a matter of personal preference on which way to go.
As far as I know ID's have always been the way to do it.
Could you guys/girls please help me argue my point by giving some reasons as to why I am correct or incorrect in your view. I would like to provide your answers as motivation to get them to change over to doing it the right way.
Your help/answers/suggestions would be much appreciated.
