Hello

I am trying to manage seeding my Unique ID with a concatenation of CreatedBy (Account Logged in) and a number from a separate seeding table rather than using the Filemaker Auto Enter functionality.

Background: I have worked in many RBMS over the years but admittedly this is my 2nd Filemaker project.

Here is my scenario:

- Multiple Individuals performing Data entry from Biz Reply Cards into single FileMaker Database (let's say tblCustomer is our main data entry table).

- Each individual must have their own sequential seeding process for Unique IDs due to the way we store our library of Biz reply Cards after they have been entered. I would like to inherit from a seed table something like tblSeed below.

tblSeed:

User[color:gray]____NextRecordID

Sam[color:gray]____178

Jess[color:gray]____212

Dave[color:gray]____119

The process I envision would be:

1) Sam Creates a New Record

2) RecordID = "Sam178" (The UniqueID would be the concatenation of User + NextRecordID )

3) Sam's row in tblSeed would increment by one

This is what I understand so far:

- can set a column "CreatedBy" and populate with Get(AccountName)

- Join "tblCustomer" to "tblSeed" via CreatedBy --> User

Questions that form up:

+ how to retrieve the NextRecordID value from tblSeed for the concatenation process?

+ how to increment by one tblSeed's NextRecordID value after retrieving?

I have been looking for days in the USer Groups and in books and haven't found the specifics on this.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks !!!

I created a solution years ago in FileMaker Pro 3 that does just what you want. I just converted it to FileMaker 8.5 and it works great. It doesn't require any scripts which is nice.

http://www.filemakerpros.com/Serialize_by_Category.zip

Make sure you use an auto-enter serial number for your primary key fields for your structural relationships and use this technique simply for reference or supporting relationships.

You're looking for headaches in this.

You would be better off dispensing with the overloaded field altogether, and use a combination of fields to achieve the same end (By "overloaded", what I mean is using one field [RecordID] to track more than one piece of information [username, Record's place in the User's Sequence]).

With the field storing the username, you can create a calculation (using a selfjoin relationship sorted by ID and/or creation time, and the user field) to display "SAM-178" if that's what you want. You have no overhead of a seedfile, no maintenance issues, fewer headaches.

David

Thanks John! Looking forward to giving it a whirl. Will post back results.