Increment Customer Name

I want to make it so when a new customer is created the customer ID defaults to the first two characters of the customer name and then an index that automatically increments. What would be the best way to go about this?

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Do a quick search @timshuwy has put together a few documents that will get you what you a looking for.

I did an advanced search on @timshuwy with the keyword “increment” and got no results. Could you link them for me?

Things I have found via google have used a BPM with custom code. I cannot use custom c# in a BPM as I am a SaaS user…

I was referring to this. Not sure about SaaS

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Hm, both methods use custom c# code in a BPM. I wish the cloud version wasn’t so restricted, it makes it hard to get help. Every cool thing I see people doing with Epicor is impossible for me. :disappointed_relieved:

Evan,

Talk to your CAM about moving to Dedicated Tenancy where you don’t see these limits. At Insights, they talked about changed to the Multi Tenant program but I’m not sure what they entail.

Mark W.

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I’ll check with a few people I know who’ve done similar and see if there are non C# alternatives.

Yup… this is one reason I am moving to an “All Widgets whenever possible” direction. I worked on a version without C# (it is possible) but never got it to a point i could publish.

If its possible, could you point me in the right direction? :bowing_man:

Probably additional restrictions :roll_eyes:

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Can I ask why you need the ID to be linked like that? If you are looking for an easy way to cross reference by name check out predictive search. If you have access to epic web this shows you how to set it up. Then you can start typing the first letters of a customer name and get a short list to pick the ID from.

https://epicweb.epicor.com/Education/OnlineHelpFeatureSummary/Epicor%20ERP%2010/10.2.100/Help/enu/Standard/Tools_Searches/PredictiveSearch.html

Guess its time for one of my mini-rants…
:grin:

  1. Customer ID is intentionally designed in Epicor to be Freeform…
  2. You are allowed to EDIT (ie… CHANGE) the customer ID, EVEN AFTER they have placed orders, invoices, processed payments, etc, and you will not loose any history.
  3. the customer ID should therefore NOT be a random number, but instead should be something that the regular users of the customer can easily remember (Yes, as @Banderson pointed out… you CAN search, and can setup predictive search… but we all know that people can and will remember things like their customer’s id… if you are going to use predictive search, they why worry about the CustID at all? Why don’t we just display the invisible Customer NUMBER?

For the reasons above, I have always promoted that the customer ID be something people can remember.
“CalPanel” = California Panel Company
“PlatSoft” = Platinum Software Corp
“DW” = Dataworks Software
“WM” = WalMart
“WM-SC” = Walmart San Clemente

Question: What if PlatSoft merges with DW… what do you do?
Answer: Change CustID DW to EPICOR… change their name to “Epicor Software Corp” and deactivate PlatSoft

Question: What if someone cant remember “CalPanel” and they want to call it “CP”
Answer: Change the CustID to anything you want.

IMHO, people put far too much meaning into the “CustID” field… it is just a way to quickly recall a customer by typing in an ID.

OK… Mini-rant Over… you may return to your regularly scheduled work.

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Not to be a suck-up, but I agree with Tim. It’s not like there isn’t search. The only time you MUST set a supplier or customer ID to a particular value is for inter-company trading.

If you don’t like the Customer ID’s or Supplier IDs, you can always export them, reassign them, and use DMT or a UBAQ to change them. They’re not like part numbers… Sometimes we get stuck on what the “old system” did and make our lives more difficult.

That’s as ranty as I’ll get.

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Actually, more like DT is what I heard.

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Well, I don’t really care what the CustomerID’s are. I was just having a problem were certain special characters were causing BAQ’s to crash, and when I brought that up to my coworker I was told that we used to have something that automatically created a customer ID in certain format. (E9 days I think?)

While enforcing a naming scheme is one way to get around the problem, I think I will just have them change every customer that has the special characters in them while I wait for Epicor to fix the issue. They accepted the issue remarkably fast so hopefully it won’t be too long.

Hmm, that looks really cool. I don’t have the rights to set it up though.

You can enforce validation restrictions in a BPM or customization without having to go all the way to auto creating ID’s. (And yes, Epicor should do this already if it isn’t allowed other places…)

edit: I do not know about restrictions on cloud though for what is available for that. I just know it’s possible in a lot of different areas.

Dear Brandon,
I recommend this approach whenever an internal issue is found where the software is willing to accept values that will cause it not to work properly. In 10.0 we had an issue where a field (I think it was ship via) could have a length up to 32 characters, but if it was 31 or 32 then those packers could not be used to generate a bill of lading. So we fixed the cases where the data was already preventing, and installed a data directive to error-out if someone tried to create a new one.
Best
…Monty.

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