Unique Serial field problem

August 22, 200322 yr

I have a Db for work-orders and have a field for serial numbers that goes IE2345, IE2346 and so on. It is a number field, Indexed, with Autu enter serial, not modyable auto, strict, required value and unique.

If mistakenly I change the "next value" field in options to a lower value than the next in line it gives me a double serial number.. Is taht normal? How can I avoid this....

Thanks a lot in advance....

August 22, 200322 yr

First of all, unique serial numbers can better be text. Becouse you can do more calculations on that field type. The serialnumber system that you are using is just a counter that increments the current value with the value you gave to the field. When you lower the current value in the field options...it will still increment the starting value with the increment value and Filemaker will think that it is a unique value since the program populates the field and not the user. It could be a bug. But how are you gonna solve this when the database is running at your customer?

greetz,

Jeffer

August 25, 200322 yr

Author

Thanks jeffer,

interesting that there's only one reply....

August 25, 200322 yr

Ahmet said:
interesting that there's only one reply....

Ahmet,

Probably most users thought you would find the answer by yourself searching the forum.

For a better understanding of what to do and not to do with IDs, check this thread.

August 25, 200322 yr

Hi Ahmet,

[color:"blue"] Logixx Said

> Probably most users thought you would find the answer by yourself searching the forum.

Perhaps we were waiting for a response from you. How are we to know that the response wasn't enough, or was confusing, or whatever?

I'll expand upon what Jeffer did say with, if your system is dependent upon the serial numbers using the "IE" part of it in some way, your field has to be text (or text result).

BTW, I just did a test search of "All Forums" using "serial number" as the phrase, and "Six Months" as the period of time. It returned an almost overwhelming number of hits, including the article pointed to by Logixx, I then narrowed the search by adding "unique" to the phrase, and it return 11 different threads including the article.

Lee