Incrementing Numbers (2000)

[stevehocking]

Good morning

I know virtually nothing about Access and nothing about any form of coding or programming, so please bear with me if I don't explain this exactly.

We have an inhouse software program that has been a 'work in progress' by 1 guy for 17 years, he is constantly fire fighting problems that each department here throws at him, one of these concerns my department and he cannot address the issue and is to stubborn (proud?) to try and get help. The problem is this

I have 20 drivers who were phoning in Proof of Deliveries (POD's) and thus bunging up the tranpsport phone lines, I therefore had a hidden page written onto our website which the drivers can access through their PDA's and can populate 4 fields which when sent updates our database in live time. This works well about 75% of the time but every now and then the server stalls on the update and a few days worth of POD's are held and not updated. The software guy is always moaning that it is an Access problem as the DB automatically increments by 1 every now and then, thus throwing the numbering system out of sync.

Does anybody recognise this or understand the problem so that I can point him into perhaps becoming a member here and not being so stubborn!

Thanks

Steve

[HansV]

If the table in which the POD data are stored has an AutoNumber field, this field will be incremented by 1 fully automatically for each new record. If a record is canceled, its AutoNumber value will not be reused.

An AutoNumber field is an excellent choice if you need a unique identifier for a record. But if you want to have a sequence number without gaps, an AutoNumber is not ideal, for the reason mentioned above. You can use a Number (Long Integer) field instead, with some code to update this field. See <post#=287,907>post 287,907</post#> for some alternatives.

[stevehocking]

Thanks very much Hans

I will pass this info to see if it helps, if he has any issues I will respetfully request him to contact the experts here

Thanks again

Steve