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CRM 4 has lots of excellent customization options, one of which is the auto-numbering of entities:

The Settings – Administration section allows you to setup some options for auto-numbering your entities, you can choose the prefix, and the suffix length:

This is pretty powerful, but how would approach this problem if you needed your entities to have a more complex numbering scheme? Being a developer, everything looks like a development task to me. So I would start with a plugin that implements the IPlugin interface:

       public class AutoNumber : IPlugin

Then we need to implement the Execute method such as:

        public void Execute(IPluginExecutionContext context)
        {
           
            if (context.InputParameters.Properties.Contains("Target"))
            {
                DynamicEntity entity = (DynamicEntity)context.InputParameters.Properties["Target"];

                if (entity != null)
                {
                    if (!entity.Properties.Contains("AttributeName"))
                    {
                        entity.Properties.Add(new StringProperty("AttributeName", GetAutoNumber()));

                    }
                }
            }
        }

So the above code will check to make sure our input properties contains the ‘Target’ parameter, this will be the entity that is affected by the plugin. From here we can cast it to a DynamicEntity  which will make it easier to work with. Once we have an instance of DynamicEntity the whole task of updating and attributes becomes trivial, the above code just creates a new property and calls some method that will generate the complex AutoNumber.

Once the plugin has been developed, the next important step is to register the plugin. The best tool for the job is probably the CRM Plugin Registration Tool:

The first step is to register the plugin assembly:

This will prompt you with a form that allows you to select the assembly and the location it will be stored i.e. Database, file system or GAC.

Once the assembly has been registered we can register a ‘new step’, this is done from the same menu as the assembly registration.

You will be prompted to fill out the following form:

For our plugin we will choose the following options:

Message: Create  (since we are doing an auto number, it makes sense to only run the plugin at the create stage)

Primary Entity:  Your choice

Plugin: Your assembly that was loaded at the previous step

Post Stage: we want to run it after the entity has been created, otherwise the built in CRM auto numbering will overwrite our value.

Synchronous: lets fire the event synchronously, no reason not to, the end user will be presented with a consistent interface this way.

Step Deployment: your choice

Triggering Pipeline: Parent

As you can see its all fairly simple and straight forward, now you can have an auto number that be what ever you need, it might be simple like some combination of a financial year or complex where a lookup to some external system needs to take place, but at the end of the day at least there is a nice mechanism in place to help you out.