Jan,
We do it the US Navy way (my husband designed it for us 22 years ago) through a date/time/group. I have even expanded it to include seconds and therefore there will be no duplicate until the next century (you could also use the four digit year). At a glance, you can tell just when the transaction occurred. Witness 011408080015. I just use a simple routine to concatenate date and time and voilà! Claudine :-) _____ From: [email protected] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of jan johansen Sent: Monday, January 14, 2008 8:30 AM To: RBASE-L Mailing List Subject: [RBASE-L] - Re: Lot numbering 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
