Altering a table

[Paulsburbon]

Hello, I use a database at work that I made. Unfortunatly, I did not add a field for numbering the items that a customer orders. When entering an order It is important to my customers to keep it in a certain order. how do I change it so it adds a numbering to all the past orders as well? I've been trying to think of a way for months and cannot do this on my own. Thank you to anyone who takes the time to help me out. If you have any questions I'll try to answer them the best I can.

 

[Robert88]

Hi Paulsburbon,

Firstly I would make a back-up, always best in case things go wrong.

Then I would open the table in design view and insert an additional field with the properties of autonumber.

I am pretty sure that when you then close the table it should autonumber existing records and create new autonumbers for new future records, do not quote me on this but give it a go.

Once you have the numbers in the table I suppose you will also have to make relevant changes to queries and forms that you use in order to display this new field.

Good Luck.

Happy to help further, let me know what happens.

Rob

 

[Paulsburbon]

Hi Robert, Thanks for the reply. I thought about doing this. The only thing is I was hoping for a way to start at 1 for every new order. So If I was to add an autonumber field I to my order detail table it would start at 1 and keeping going. So say my second order I ever did the first item on it would have the number 10 in it instead of starting at 1 again. Am I making myself clear here? I'm not the best when describing what I need. I also need to be able to place a new record inbetween two. I don't think autonumber would let me do that. If I had an order with three records in it and I need to place the newest one bewteen the first and second I thought I could make the new record 1.5 or something like that. This might be alot to ask but I'm out of idea's myself. Thank you again for your time in reading this.

 

[Robert88]

Question, the number you refer to, that you want to add is it currently somewhere in the table you have or is a number you would manually have to add to existing records?

Look forward to your response.

 

[Paulsburbon]

Thanks for the reply. I do not have it in the database anywhere. It is something I want to add. Thanks again.

 

[Paulsburbon]

Wow, That was an amazing solution. Thank you so much for your help. I'm going to give it a try on a backup of the data base over the weekend. When I get some time. Thank you again. This forum is a life saver for me.