Automatic Data Entry

[Chuck Pelto]

Morning Guys,

On Oct 27, 2004, at 2:10 AM, Peter De Berdt wrote:

> My guess would be Filemaker background (globals from Filemaker). I've 
> seen a lot of Filemaker developers trying to do this when switching to 
> another database system. It's not a good practice, that's for sure.

In part correct, Peter. But not quite. A technique I use for key fields 
consists of a alpa-char code AND a serial number in the key field to 
help me keep track of which table is being linked to. So I'd like to 
have an automatic alpha-char populated into a field and a serial number 
automatically incremented to go along with it to make a key that is 
unique to the record and the table.

E.g. "Datafile" & "0000000123" to make Datafile0000000123 as the key 
field for a record in a datafile in a database system.

The other aspect is automatically populating a given field with a given 
value. That value may be changed at a later date, e.g., all 
ItemQuantity values for records in a given data file are populated with 
1, when a new record is created in a sales-related datafile. This can 
be changed by the user at a latter date, but since 1 is the most common 
occurrence, then that reduces their work for entry.

Regards,

Chuck