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Is there a crm auto increment field?

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Is there a simple way in CRM to have an auto increment field? Obviously I can use an ID but for users a reference like ID=7 is a damn site more useful than 36 characters of gibberish. CRM runs off an SQL database and SQL databases have auto increment fields as standard so it seems unlikely that there is no way in CRM to include such a field so how does one do it?

Tuesday, April 7, 2015 10:36 AM

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Hello,

You can't have AutoInc fields without any customization/development. Recheck following articles:

https://advcrm2011autonumber.codeplex.com/

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/crm/archive/2008/05/13/auto-numbers-in-microsoft-dynamics-crm.aspx

http://survivingcrm.com/2013/12/auto-numbering-workflows-real-time-vs-asynchronous/
Dynamics CRM MVP
My blog
- Proposed as answer by Andrii ButenkoMVP, Moderator Tuesday, April 7, 2015 11:01 AM
- Unproposed as answer by J N Brand Tuesday, April 7, 2015 2:27 PM
Tuesday, April 7, 2015 10:43 AM

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OK, that's what I thought seemed to be the case but it just seemed so stupidly wrong for MS to omit something so useful, simple and standard that I was hoping I was wrong (I can see why that site is called "surviving" CRM :-) )

Tuesday, April 7, 2015 10:56 AM
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It sounds "simple" until you consider the requirements of things like working in the offline client, and of course potential issues of scaling and contention.

There are some interesting points about the right and wrong ways of implementing code for auto-numbering in this recent whitepaper "Scalable Dynamics CRM Customizations" (much of which applies to earlier versions too):

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=45905
Hope this helps.
Adam Vero, Microsoft Certified Trainer | Microsoft Community Contributor 2011
UK CRM Guru Blog

Monday, April 13, 2015 11:17 AM
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It sounds "simple" until you consider the requirements of things like working in the offline client, and of course potential issues of scaling and contention.

Which sounds like a good reason until you realise that there are trivial solutions for those issues which don't depend on using incomprehensible Guids and which use standard SQL auto inc fields.

Tuesday, April 14, 2015 9:37 AM
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I have used this tool from ADX Studio for auto-numbering and it works very well. You can use it in a workflow, or add some custom code in a plugin.

http://community.adxstudio.com/products/adxstudio-productivity-pack/

Tuesday, April 14, 2015 1:55 PM

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Is there a crm auto increment field?

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