creating GUIDs/long unique identifiers

[ggantzer]

Hello,

I am not very experienced with FileMaker and am working on a project. We have a list of customers, each with a customer id, and want to send out a mailing with custom links for each user. We were going to send out something like www.website.com/page.htm?id=1234, where 1234 is the customer id. BUT, we dont want this number to be guessable or sequential.

I've seen GUIDs (globally unique IDs...really long letter number combinations) being used by others, where each customer's ID is either GUID-like, or each customer has a second identifier for this purpose. Is there a way in Filemaker 6 to automatically generate and store a GUID for each user already in the DB?

Any help much appreciated!

ggantzer

[email protected]

[transpower]

One method would be to add a random number to the customer ID. This would then be your second identifier. The random number would be large enough so that the chances of a duplicate would be nill.

[Brian C]

Transpower is correct. You can make use of the Random function to generate a very long random number.

Keep in mind you will be getting a number that has a decimal at the beginning and is 15 digits in length.

If you want to parse out only a portion of the number, you can multiply the number by some factor of 10 to move the portion of the number you want to be in front of the decimal place and then use the int() function to grab only the number in front of the decimal.

example:

if your random number = .117766756153557

Then using: int(random * 100000)

will give you: 11776