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General solution for missing sequence numbers
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] |
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