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
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Fletcher Data Consulting
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