Turn off Auto-Increment on the fly?

[Rich Hartnett]

I have an electronic parking citation program that officers fill out in the police cruiser, and upon clicking the submit button, the citation number is automatically inserted into the record, based on an auto-increment field rule.

This works just fine, except that there are times when traditional hand-written citations are issued, and for accountability reasons, we need to manually enter those hand-written citations in the table.

Since the hand-written citations have completely different citation numbers, I need a way to temporarily turn off the auto-increment feature while a records clerk performs data entry, and I'd like to perform everything from a web-based screen.

Is this even possible?

[Steve Wood]

Re: Turn off Auto-Increment on the fly?

From my experience, you cannot turn off autoinc. You even have to manually remove the field rules just to populate the field adhoc with an operation or manually.

However there are two ways to autoincrement a value. One is the autoincrement field rule. The other is with the function increment_value().

You are probably using a Grid, adding only one record at a time. So in the BeforeValidateNewRecords event, use xbasic to a) get the previous records value for your field, b) conditionally use increment_value() to increment the value, and c) write the new value to the "autoincrement field". Obviously, you also have to remove the autoincrement field rule from that field. The conditional could be a Calculated field such as "manual ticket? True/False".

You could use this to create two different sequences of ticket numbers; one that autoincrements, the other a dummy value. Now, it will become important to know WHICH previous record has a true autoincrement value. You don't want to accidently increment the dummy value.

[Bill Parker]

Re: Turn off Auto-Increment on the fly?

To have multiple sequences (autoinc and manual) going, you definately need to remove the field rule and manage it in the application. Create a table with just one record, to hold the current "auto increment" value.

When a manual citation is entered, use the supplied manual value. When a normal citation is entered, increment and save the value in the "increment.dbf", and use that value in the citation record.

Bill.

[Peter.Greulich]

Re: Turn off Auto-Increment on the fly?

I would do it slightly differently. Two fields:
1. Citation_id - an autoincrement field for ALL citations, including manual
2. Citation_No - stuff in the Citation_id value, EXCEPT when entering a manual citation