


I am wondering if there is a storage table somewhere that is storing the last increment value issued. For the life of me I can not figure out where in what table, the auto increment value is, after editing all three tables. Problem is that I made this change in all the serial fields, cleared the cache and it still had no effect. I had actually done it prior to reading your entry because this simple method is how to change the start increment in D6. I had tackled the MySQL table directly just as you said. Or it could be set every time if importing a huge amount of pre-existing records. This will allow users to set it only the first time, to solve the issue here, and then never do it again.

To keep it out of the way in most cases, it could be in a collapsed fieldset. So we could have an additional widget (other than the default hidden automatic one) that will by default be unset, but could be set by editors. This was the idea behind the above-mentioned feature request. If we went this route, you would be able to, for example, explicitly state your auto-increment values as you were importing them from another system through Feeds. If a value isn't specified, is NULL or "0", the system will provide the next auto-increment value for you, but it does allow you to specify your own. The auto-increment system is set up to accept provided values if there are any. You could specify any value you wanted for a particular instance, and as a result, you'd be able to specify the initial value, solving this particular issue.

Why not always allow users to specify the value if they wish, but if they didn't specify, then they would get the next auto-increment value? I was recently approached by bhauff on IRC to inquire about a feature request to specify the auto-increment values explicitly.
