Winfried's approach makes a lot of sense and I think I've just made the decision to employ it for all future projects, having just had to do a lot of replacing/matching imports on a client's system, and having struggled for years with imports that require a careful inclusion of the Set Next Serial Value. I'd say that Winfried's approach is just about perfect.
BTW, Ray Cologon has a universal key that includes capturing a variety of data, timestamps and MAC address among them, and converts it to a Base 36 hash so as to shorten it. I always thought it was overkill, but I'm starting to drift toward it these days. BTW(2): If you use a script to duplicate records (capture the menu command with Custom Menus) you can set the new key with the same calculation as the auto-enter one. j. On Jun 22, 2010, at 10:05 PM, Richard S. Russell wrote: > On 2010 Jun 22, at 20:14, Winfried Huslik wrote: > >> Richard, >> >> You don't have to take care of the Next Auto-enter value. You can freely >> import a number of records created on your Laptop (which may hold a copy of >> your database) without worrying about duplicate serial numbers. You may >> update accidentally deleted records using a backup with matching IDs, etc. >> >> One possible caveat may be that duplicating a record does NOT create a new >> serial number. This may be an advantage or disadvantage - it depends... > > > Ah, got it. Thanks. A somewhat different set of trade-offs than I'm used to, > but I can already start to see instances where it would come in handy. -- Jonathan Fletcher FileMaker 9 & 10 Certified Developer Fletcher Data Consulting [email protected] http://www.fletcherdata.com 502-509-7137 Kentuckiana's Only FileMaker Users Group: Listserv signup: http://fmpug.com/mailman/listinfo/louisville_fmpug.com Blog: http://kyfmp.com Next meeting: 7/15/10 1:00 pm
