Thanks for all the input, everybody. The solution was to take Richard's original response to the shipping guys - fortunately they're a good-natured and humorous bunch.
Initially amused by the contents of an email from the far side of the world, the global opposition to their request for re-usable numbers led to a quick surrender. With FileMaker strictly controlling number issue by script, there could be no "missing numbers" and therefore no "dropped" cargo. So the cups have been put the right way up....never underestimate the power of this list. Steve, I understand your solution involving a destination port table with one record per port. But it is a multi-user, server environment, and I have had problems before where two users grabbed the same serial number using this type of "add one to existing record value". In this solution, duplicate document numbers would cause huge problems. How to avoid that? Is it possible for user1 to lock that port record, add one to serial number, set to a variable, commit and exit? Regards Peter -----Original Message----- From: FileMaker Pro Discussions [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Mike Sent: 22 December 2011 17:42 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: Serial number Hi Peter, I did something like this once because of a very similar customer request that made perfect sense at the time. I handled it all with scripts. If a document was deleted, I stored the number. When assigning a number to a new document, I check my deleted documents list to be sure there wasn't a number that I needed to reused before I assigned a new number. There is some management of the list required, but the script has run flawlessly for over 8 years. Hope that helps. Mike On 11-12-22 5:54 AM, Steve Cassidy wrote: > On 22 Dec 2011, at 05:29, Peter Buchanan wrote: > >> So any further ideas on the gaps? > No. But further ideas based on the situation you describe. > > If you were to assign the numbers only at the moment of sailing (or whatever is your cutoff point for absolute final documentation), then there'd be no problem with cancellations... > > So what about using some kind of 'in-house' provisional numbering if needed during the cargo manifesting process leading up to departure. Then use a script to assign correctly serialised numbers at the point when you print/finalise the summary document. > > Maybe you could come up with some other means of ensuring that no cargo is 'dropped'. (In fact, I can't really see how studying the summary report helps to locate any dropped cargo; you might want to investigate this process in more detail to see what you can contribute.) > > Steve
