viewing id field for contacts, accounts, opportunities

[jcb23]

Windows XP and Vista
Sugar 5.0.0b
Apache 2.2.4
PHP: 5.2.3-1ubuntu6.3
MySQL Server: 5.0.45-1ubuntu3.3

My company needs the ability to view and search by id (but of course not the ability to change it). I was able to add the id field so that its one they can view and search by, but the data in the field is of course coming up as the long string version of the id number you see when you export data or view data from phpmyadmin. In an older version of sugar I remembering the id showing as a number at the top of the candidates record and they're being some sort of code you could include in queries to convert this number from the string version to an actual number. Does anyone know what this code is?

Thanks.

jcb23

[Angel]

I've played with Sugar at one level or another since around the 3.x days and I don't recall the ID values for opps, accounts or contacts ever being anything other than the 32 character long ID value you see today. Cases and bugs I believe are the only ones that have numeric ID values. At least that's my recollection.

In any case, searching based on a string that long would seem to require quite a bit from a user, unless they are doing it programmatically.

Perhaps elaborating on why you want to search based on ID would help us formulate a potential solution for you.

[SugarDev.net]

I think you're better off creating an ID next to it, auto incrementing with 1, so that sorting it has a meaning. Just like cases and bugs. But I think there's some programming involved.

[jcb23]

I've played with Sugar at one level or another since around the 3.x days and I don't recall the ID values for opps, accounts or contacts ever being anything other than the 32 character long ID value you see today. Cases and bugs I believe are the only ones that have numeric ID values. At least that's my recollection.

In any case, searching based on a string that long would seem to require quite a bit from a user, unless they are doing it programmatically.

Perhaps elaborating on why you want to search based on ID would help us formulate a potential solution for you.

We have a few contacts with similar or the same names, but who are actually different people. In the past the way the company has always differentiated between these different contacts is their ID. Its their most reliable way to search for a contact and know that they'll definitely get the person they want in their results.

I had thought about creating my own id field and having it auto increment. For now I'll try that. I do vividly remember having a query at one point that translated the id number from the 32 character long value to a few digit long number. I'm not sure how I happened upon such a query, but I know I've used it. Oh well.