Need to reference a fixed record, for example, Accounts Payables, or SARS-CoV-2? Challenge with fixed records is that we have no idea what the record identifier is, how to reliably search for the record and how to pass it as a parameter between environments.

Why not to use a fixed guid and create that entity when needed?

1. Goto https://www.guidgenerator.com/ or any other guid generator of your choice.
2. Generate a new guid. Don’t worry about duplicate detection. You have not seen that guid before, trust me.
3. Get the record you’re after using that guid
   • restrict the attributes to what you need; if checking for the record presence and nothing else, put in just the primary key entitynameid.
4. Create that record if failed
   • configure create action to run on fail
   • set record id to that guid you’ve created earlier
5. Now you can safely use the reference in lookups etc.

Something like this:

Cover photo by Thorn Yang from Pexels