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Purpose of AutoNumber field

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Posted on by FerrDiBarnes

What is the purpose of the AutoNumber primary name field? Since is not guaranteed to be unique, why else would you want to use it?

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Microsoft Dataverse with Power Apps

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Shawn11 152 on at

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Hi @FerrDiBarnes if you make the field read- only then it can be unique right.

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FerrDiBarnes 51 on at

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How do you make it read only? The field does not appear on any form.

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a33ik 3,306 Most Valuable Professional on at

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Hello,

There are a few techniques to guarantee the uniqueness of that field:

You can create an alternate key on top of your autonumber field so if the value is repeated - the record just won't be created and a user will see an error. Maintenance of such schema is complicated if you're dealing with dataimports and the field is pre-set externally that would override the autonumber value or allow the manual editing of that field.

You can add the randomly generated postfix to the autonumber format and it'll with quite high probability gives you the unique value - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/customerengagement/on-premises/developer/create-auto-number-attributes?view=op-9-1#autonumberformat-options

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Shawn11 152 on at

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Hello @FerrDiBarnes
Please refer https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Microsoft-Dataverse/Autonumber-isn-t-unique/td-p/1744606

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FerrDiBarnes 51 on at

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I appreciate the workaround, but really my question is why is there a duplicating autonumber feature in the first place. When would you want that? I guess that is just a sub question to the main question: What is the purpose of the primary name field, other than "the field you think is unique but if not no harm since all the joins are on the GUID, except there will be harm because you will end up with duplicate records with different GUIDS when importing records unless you have created alternate keys on the columns you thought were unique".

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