I get it; however, "our way" would allow a customer to be assigned to more than one location without insanely duplicating his/her i.d. #, and would allow a historic path of successive locations, etc...
On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 6:11 AM, Lawrence Lustig <[email protected]>wrote: > << > I can't resist chiming in even though I'm probably way out of my league. > If I understand you, the custno is a sort of combo field that includes an id > # plus a ".1" which identifies a location? If that's correct, then they're > using the "tens" decimal value to represent a location? Seems way far out > and wrong way to do that. > >> > > Well, I wouldn't set it up this way myself. I'd do it as you described. > However, it's the very foundation of the a huge system that's been running > for two decades, and there's no possible business case to be made for > changing it now. > > And, to be honest, although I'd be inclined to do it with two integer > columns myself, the way it's set up (with one real column) is perfect for > this particular application. There's no downside. It allows users to > search for locations by typing into a single field, not two, and still > allows indexed searches across all locations for a single customer number. > Even yesterday, when the display was temporarily not what people were > expecting, the application itself did not fail. So even if I had the > opportunity to change it now, I wouldn't. > > -- > Larry > > -- William Stacy, O.D. Please visit my website by clicking on : http://www.folsomeye.net and check out my new blog at http://drstacy.blogspot.com/
