Issue with Seed Value when importing a solution into another environment

[Guzzie]

Hello,

I have created a solution in an environment and within a table, I have created a column “RecordNumber” which is Autonumber.  The Autonumber Type is “String prefixed number”. The value is 2 for “Minimum number of digits” and 1 for “Seed Value”.

However, when I verify this column after import into a different environment, I see the value for the “Seed Value” has changed to its default value being 1,000.

Consequence:

The intended autonumbering is 01/02/03/…

With the imported solution, the autonumbering becomes 1001/1002/1003/…

Has somebody already encountered this issue?

[carlsagan]

Did you guys edit the seed value in the solution.xml file? I'm sure there is a way to change it through there, but not sure what the parameters is for the dataverse schema. This is what it looks like, you can  see there is the prefix - {SEQNUM:5} since I chose to have 5 digits, i think seqnum is a sql data type, but there is no mention of the seed value here. Can you guys open the customization xml and tell me what this value is for the table?

To find the table name search for "LocalizedName="Table Name" to get to it quickly in the xml. Then you'll be in the branch for column names. I'm curious now what the seed number is when you guys configured it correctly. Thanks!

[carlsagan]

Actually I found another solution that involves using Postman and Webapi to update the seed value. Basically webapi has a post request method is specifically used to set the autonumber seed value. This does require you to be familiar with http requests, and learn a little about how you can interact with dataverse using their webapi. You can do things like query and list all accounts, contacts, filter them, etc. But also do things like update records that are already in the dataverse, as well as change table columns, and alter the column metadata (aka autonumber seed value).

Long story short, all I had to do was create a POST request with the following body to target the table and column name and seed value. And it updated the production environment just like that. But you need to be careful when doing things that alter the schema in production with simple requests, since it's easy to screw up.

After sending the post request, i just refreshed my production environment in power apps and looked at the column seed value and it was set to what i sent in the request. If you are familiar with http requests, postman etc., this approach takes about 5 minutes. If you are not, I left some starting points and links below to get you going.

If you are unfamiliar with postman, follow this tutorial to setup your environment so you can start querying the dataverse with web api requests, it's fairliy straight forward.
Set up a Postman environment (Microsoft Dataverse for Apps) - Power Apps | Microsoft Learn

Go here and check out the SetAutoNumberSeed Example

Create autonumber columns (Microsoft Dataverse) - Power Apps | Microsoft Learn

I'm sure the solutions above worked as well, but this is another option out there for fellow developers.

[thomst08-mahony]

Hey @carlsagan,

That's an awesome find and good trick.

Thanks for sharing. 🙂

[Martin0203]

Hi All

In my case we are switching from custom auto-numbering to the OOB auto-numbering for an ID field. So records with highest number of 20'000 already exist.

1. Change the field to auto-numbering on DEV environment, set seed value to be the next higher value

2. Export solution with the field managed

3. Put QA environment in admin mode (to avoid changes by users)

4. Import managed solution to QA

5. Set seed value to the next higher value on QA

6. create one record of the table

7. check the number is correct

8. delete the record

9. remove the unmanaged layer from the column

10. remove admin mode from environment

All future records have numbers one higher than the record created in 6, so just one number is lost. This also implies that Microsoft stores the value somewhere were it is hidden from the admins. If the stored value could be made available for editing by admin the complicated process everyone describes can be avoided.

[DoubleEm]

  The process is indeed complicated.