Bob, Alastair, David, Thank you for your suggestions. The only reason for the YYYYMMDD sequence was to allow a form of secondary identification to a lot i.e. visual using human readable. I had initially proposed just using an autonumber but the client requested a form of secondary identification. The request was for the numbering sequence to begin anew every day hence today = 20080114001 tomorrow = 20080115001
so concatenating an autonumber to the date doesn't quite work Another goal would be to keep the length the same since a 1 character 128code is narrower than a 6 character. So just using an autonumber starting at one would not quite work unless it could be formatted as 0000000001 (formatting an autonumber integer?) or just using 10000000001 and go with that. But again what does that mean to someone looking at it. I'm begining to lean towards 20080114063030 (YYYYMMDDHHMMSS). This format remains consistent (as long as someone doesn't screw with the DATETIME settings and allows it to be stored as INTEGER vs TEXT. Enjoyed the discussion. Jan
