Sql server - Windowed functions can only appear in the SELECT or ORDER BY clauses

Question

I am trying to insert records into a table and need to insert the the column SubscriberWeightingID that should be sequential order in an existing table ALO_DimSubscriberWeighting in Sql sever database. Ideally the SubscriberWeightingID should be latest based on that table and should continue in sequential order for the remaining. This is what I tried but getting error How do i achieve that I have used the orber by clause but it is still complaining. Is there another way to do it. I have basically 50 such inserts to execute

insert into ALO_DimSubscriberWeighting ([SubscriberWeightingID],[SubscriberNK],[WeightingAmount],[IsActive]) values ((ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY [SubscriberWeightingID]),'NSFR80R0040C0090','0',1)   
insert into ALO_DimSubscriberWeighting ([SubscriberWeightingID],[SubscriberNK],[WeightingAmount],[IsActive]) values ((ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY [SubscriberWeightingID]),'NSFR80R0040C0100','0',1)   
insert into ALO_DimSubscriberWeighting ([SubscriberWeightingID],[SubscriberNK],[WeightingAmount],[IsActive]) values ((ROW_NUMBER() OVER(ORDER BY [SubscriberWeightingID]),'NSFR80R0040C0110','0',1) 

Error

Invalid column name 'SubscriberWeightingID'.
Msg 4108, Level 15, State 1, Line 1
Windowed functions can only appear in the SELECT or ORDER BY clauses

Answer 1

If you want to manually increment an id, you can use:

insert into ALO_DimSubscriberWeighting ([SubscriberWeightingID],[SubscriberNK],[WeightingAmount],[IsActive]) 
    select coalesce(max(SubscriberWeightingID) + 1, 1), 'NSFR80R0040C0090', '0', 1) 
    from ALO_DimSubscriberWeighting;

This mechanism is highly NOT recommended, because it is not thread-safe. Different insert s can insert the same value.

However, if you are stuck in a situation where you have a table with no identity column and no column defaulted to a sequence, then this is one way to do what you want. It should only be used until you fix the database to automatically generate the values.

Answer 2

You can use identity column to achieve that. However if you want to achieve that as you tried in your code then please try this:

insert into ALO_DimSubscriberWeighting ([SubscriberWeightingID],[SubscriberNK],[WeightingAmount],[IsActive]) 
values ((select isnull(max([SubscriberWeightingID]),0)+1 
from ALO_DimSubscriberWeighting),'NSFR80R0040C0090','0',1)