Global Field Broken...

[David Maffucci]

Hello,

For a few years I've had a great contacts database I made in FileMaker. Contacts where one of several types but the most special type was customers. Customers were assigned a number "Customer Number". Since there were a few types of records, I could not make customer number an auto-entered number, rather I had a Global field with a number in it. When a contact became a customer, I clicked a button which would copy this Global number, paste it into the Customer number field and then increment the global number by one. It worked for years.

But now it's broken, and I think I know why. I just opened the FileMaker database up to two other people who work with me. Now it's being shared and I think what happens is, if I'm editing a record and one of the other people try to add a new customer it fails because the global field would effectively be changed while I'm editing a record. In any case, it fails to work often and creates all kinds of new nightmares. I'm new to the whole sharing thing and I don't know how to make all this work better. Clearly my global is not a good way to do this, how else can I assign a sequential customer number? I'd be happy to create another table but won't that have the same problem?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

[comment]

Why do you need the customer number to be consecutive (it won't be consecutive anyway, since customers can be deleted and contacts can cease being customers)?