MOSS 2010 Content Deployment Reset List ID's

Question

We want to synchronize data across several environments that are not production, ie dev, test ect. We have several list that are set to order by ID. The problem is that when doing the content deployment the ID's are not kept in sync across environments which causes the data to not display in the expected order. Is there a way to reseed the ID's in the receiving tables to match the record being inserted?

Answer 1

The best way I've found to do this is to periodically copy the content database itself back down from Production and attach copies of it to each of the environments. This is very simple to do but does have a few potential drawbacks, such as:

1. Any manual changes to the dev/qa environments are wiped out (if you are using features to deploy customizations this should not be an issue)
2. Dev/qa content is replaced which can lead to a potential loss of test data
3. The production database is often very large and can eat up precious DB space on the typically spartan dev/QA database servers
4. You MUST be using the exact same version of SharePoint in each environment

That said, it has some very strong points as well

1. Developers are testing against real-world data which means that they can test against situations that would be extremely complex to manually replicate
2. Fewer surprises as code is moved through environments since it is effectively developed in "production"
3. All internal IDs exactly match in each environment making it much easier to move ID-bound components (i.e. many webparts) from environment to environment

Answer 2

In SharePoint list ids only remain the same if the lists were created declaratively (ie defined in XML in a feature).

If the lists are created through the UI, in script, or programatically they will get a new id in the import destination. It's a big plus for defining lists (properly) in features.

I think.

Answer 3

Thanks for the responses guys. As the Content Deployment is a requirement across several version of the production site as well a db restore is not a valid solution for us. What I ended up doing was creating an additional column in the list to support sort order (int), then wrote n OrderBy query in CAML to sort by that column. This was where I was trying to go to begin with but for some reason the way my access in the Site Admin was set up limited what actions I could take on that column. We ended up getting that prepped and the query works great.