Hi All,
It was from 1986 thru 1993 that I programmed a comprehensive
application in DataPerfect (appr. 80.000 lines of code, comprising
30 interrelated panels) which administered the complete workflow for
an
advertising photography and or movie production studio. A last set of
modules that was added to the application, consisted of an automated
bookkeeping add-on, that would function also as a stand-alone.
At that time, believing computers would not run any faster than they
did, I programmed each relative link thus, that to obtain an absolute
unique record in the indexes, it had to generate a hidden date and
timestamp at the creation of each new record. When closing the
book-year at years end, through the printer level, the data would be
changed as to block the original data input. This panel replicated
the
original (separate) data-input panel and could also be used to
recover
old data whenever something would corrupt the financial files.
Until now the application has continued to work flawlessly. But with
the speed of computers these days, the system does not work any more
when reconstructing the records, because within one second many
records
can be generated carrying the same time stamp, thus corrupting the
index(es) for those newly generated records.
Reprogramming this time stamp to a <FORMAT:~GZZZZZZZZZ9::IH~> is not
a
good option, given that over time millions of numbers must be
generated; all being unique! Thus I kept one old computer with an AMD
386 40MHz. processor. Having that system processor running at half
speed, would be sufficient to keep generating records at less than
one
record a second, as to comply with each record keeping a unique value
in the indexes.
With this sole computer becoming older and thus more unreliable,
Something must be done to keep the system up and running. I have
tried
to find an answer in forcefully slowing the clock speed of present
day
processors, but nobody has an answer to that so far.
Another option would be a math formula (applicable to DataPerfect
DPIMP
compilation) that could generate unique coding (either numbers, or a
combination of numbers and letters).
Does anyone have a suggestion?
Jacques
