creating unique id on remote pc

[CALV]

Hi all,

Got my job database going quite well, at the moment, it generates a job number form the first 4 letters of the customers name, and the ID (autonumber), so for example mr smith's job number would be SMIT0012 (assuming the 12th entry in the database)
Now this works fine, tables are linked and the database access the tables via a mapped network drive for other pc's (2) to use. But the problem is, if the database user were to be at a remote location with a laptop, how could this work? I could use a local copy of the tables but then of course the ID's wouldnt match! Can anyone offer any ideas on this?

Thanks

 

[Keith P]

Hi
If you are to use a laptop for updating your data then read up on Replication. It haddles the sort of problem you have identified using globally unique identifiers (GUIDs). These are random rather than sequential numbers.
I hope this helps.

 

[CALV]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply, I did look into setting the autonumber to random but that still left me with the problem of possible duplicae jobID's since I only use 4 (for now) of the numbers, I'll read up on replication tomorrow and see what I can come up with, at least I have a starting point now !