deploy sample content in list from Visual studio includes people picker

Question

I have the following default sample data in my list which deploay just fine.

<Row>

        <Field Name="Holiday Balance (Days)">10</Field>
        <Field Name="Holiday Balance (Hours)">700</Field>
    </Row>

However when I try to include the Collumn which contains a people picker

<Row>
        <Field Name="Team 1">My User Name</Field>
        <Field Name="Holiday Balance (Days)">10</Field>
        <Field Name="Holiday Balance (Hours)">700</Field>
    </Row>

It deploys fine but NO content...is this a limitation of VS deployed lists? For username I have tried my name, my email and my "key" to no avail.

TIA

S

Answer 1

Prepopulating lists with users is tricky because a User field is a special type of Lookup field. This means that you need to know the value of the ID of the user more than the name of the User.

This is possible if are deploying your feature to a single known site. But the same user can have different ID values on different site collections. So if this feature will be targeted to multiple site collections, then you will need to use a feature receiver to prepopulate the list.

For more information, see Adding Sample data to User Field type.