another seniors moment

[eeetee]

hi again:

i'm sure that it's been covered before but...

i have a character field that is defined as user entered. i don't want to set the field rules to auto increment as the table gets emptied on occasion. if it is emptied i want the first record entered's record_id to start at "J00000001". this was pretty easy:

tbl1=table.open("g_l_head")
tbl1.index_primary_put()
tbl1.fetch_last()
if (tbl1.journal_num="")
_journal_num="J00000001"

then _journal_num gets placed in the appropriate field later (it is a dim'ed c variable). if the field was not blank then i want to "autoincrement" the character string to read "J00000002" (assuming that the previous entry was "J00000001"). i've used isolating the numeric portion of the string, incrementing it and putting it back together again. it worked, however i'm sure that there is an obvious method that i' missing somewhere.

any suggestions?

thanks,

ed

[Ken L Herrold]

RE: another seniors moment

Ed:

Another 'senior' is replying here. [65]

I just tried a test DB using auto-increment resident in field rules. Is it that you don't want the first record to be J000000000 and that it MUST BE J000000001? The reason I ask is that the field rule auto increment seems to work perfectly both to start a new empty table and even after the records are deleted and packed - in the case of a 'full' table.Alpha wants to start with .....'0' for the first record.

This test table that I built had three fields the first of which was auto increment with the mask 'J##########' [however many characters your example had, I think 10]

DUH! on my part, maybe, but have you tried this?

Senior Ken - the newbie.

[Ken L Herrold]

RE: another seniors moment

Ed:

Whoops, another thought. Do you realize that you're leaving enough room for 99,999,999 records with that long ID 'number'. That's 99 MILLION. Just think, we as seniors may have these applications running posthumusly - adding to our 'Imortality' Ha!

Ken

[Jeff Moses]

RE: another seniors moment

Ed, You might modify your script:

tbl1=table.open("g_l_head")
tbl1.index_primary_put()
tbl1.fetch_last()
temp_char=substr(tbl1.journal_num,1,1)'gets the J
temp_c=str(val(substr(tbl1.journal_num,2,8))+1,8,0)'adds one
tbl1.fetch_next()
tbl1.change_begin()
if (tbl1.journal_num="") then
tbl1.journal_num="J00000001"
end if
if isnotblank("tbl1.journal_num") then
tbl1.journal_num=temp_char+temp_c
end if
tbl1.change_end(.t.)
tbl1.close()
end

Jeff

[Jeff Moses]

RE: another seniors moment

Ed, Error in script. I reversed if changes:

tbl1=table.open("g_l_head")
tbl1.index_primary_put()
tbl1.fetch_last()
temp_char=substr(tbl1.journal_num,1,1)'gets the J
temp_c=str(val(substr(tbl1.journal_num,2,8))+1,8,0)'adds one
tbl1.fetch_next()
tbl1.change_begin()
if isnotblank("tbl1.journal_num")
tbl1.journal_num=temp_char+temp_c
end if
if (tbl1.journal_num="") then
tbl1.journal_num="J00000001"
end if
tbl1.change_end(.t.)
tbl1.close()
end

[eeetee]

RE: another seniors moment

hi:

thanks for your replies. i thought that i was missing an obvoius instruction or function to do what was required. yep the range is a tad too big as pointed out!

thanks again

ed