Hi David,

the gaps are not occurring now, they are leftovers of a sadly mismanaged
database with an uneducated user. And the original database was not even
written for that particular purpose. It was written by a self-taught
scientist in another department for some other use and this woman decided it
might work for her as well. And it did, somewhat - the original author
didn't do that bad a job for someone with no technical schooling. It just
wasn't really suited for her particular needs.

--
Pete



"David C. Holley" píse v diskusním príspevku
...
To summarize, I believe that the general question is - What is happening
that is causing the gaps to occurr?

John Vinson wrote:
On Mon, 5 Dec 2005 18:53:45 +0100, "Peter Danes"
wrote:


Such situations are common, for a variety of reasons. Depends on the
database and the user and what the data is for. The particular example
that
inspired this outburst is a mycological database, where the numbers are
used
to sequentially number the scientist's samples. She told me that
numbering
is important for others in the field to know roughly how many samples a
particular researcher has, and for internal inventory purposes, that
they
don't expect to have holes in the numbering sequence.


I agree that Access' autonumber isn't suitable in such cases... but
there are real, major problems with "filling in the gaps."

How did the gap get there in the first place? Presumably a Sample #312
was entered at some point, and then deleted: the entry was found to be
erroneous, misnumbered, or for some other reason had to be removed.
New entries would go in up at Sample #844 but you now have this gap.

OK... fill in the gap then. BUT!

What if there's a publication referring to the (erroneous) old Sample
312, and you now assign a DIFFERENT sample the same number? What if
someone has 312 written down on a Post-It note as "check up on this
really interesting sample" - or noted in their memory? Sure, you can
change it in the database; but where *else* does the information
exist, and can you change *that*?

John W. Vinson[MVP]