Auto-Number creating duplicates!

khankoff

I am using an Auto-Number column in my sheet to generate a new Request ID with every entry.  I noticed this morning that there are duplicates of the same Request ID in the sheet.  This is a concern because the RQID needs to be unique for each record. 

There are two ways a record is created with the sheet.  One is if a user leverages a web form to submit a request.  The other is when a trained user (there are only a few shared to the sheet) enters a new record and saves it.

When I first created the sheet, I did consolidate multiple sheets into one, and made sure all the ID's were unique.  However since then, the column has been locked.  And because it's an Auto-Number column anyway now, I don't understand why a record I created this morning would generate a RQID-017 when one with that number already exists in the column.

Thoughts from the community?

khankoff

Still don't know why this happened, but could be due to the consolidation of multiple sheets.  Anyway...  I've set a starting number sequence to use going forward, and seem (i hope) to have solved my own problem.  Time will tell.

Paul Newcome

Yes. It would be because of the sheet consolidation. The auto-number column only accounts for what IT has generated on THAT sheet. IF you were to manually enter something, it would not be accounted for by the auto-number and can therefore be duplicated.

khankoff

Thanks, Paul.  Makes sense that only auto-numbers generated by the sheet would be "known" by the app.  However, now that I've got three duplicates in my sheet, I'm wondering if it's ok to temporarily change the column type, add something to make those three unique (RQID-18, RQID-18a, RQID-18b), and then change the column type back to auto-number.

Thoughts?

BTW - is it just me, or is Community still PAINFULLY slow these days??

Paul Newcome

I am not sure if the auto-number would pick up where it left off or start over at 1. When I use an auto-number type column, I generally am just using it for the number portion and have it linked to a helper column for a prefix and/or suffix and have that helper column displayed.

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The Community didn't used to be this slow. I don't think I noticed this slow-down until more recently (around ENGAGE coincidentally enough).