Automatic Document Naming

[dbakeg00]

I'm very new to both Access and to this forum. Please have patience with me.



I'm looking to design a form in Access that has a documents number field. Ideally, this field would auto-generate a document number based on a logical naming convention. Any thoughts on the best way to go about this? Please let me know if you need any additional information. Thanks in advance.

[orange]

Have you worked on details of such a (logical naming) process in plain English or with pencil and paper?

Root base prefix suffix version modifier abbreviation/codification constraints sort of thiing?

[dbakeg00]

There is a basic naming convention in place right now (paper format). I will probably want to deviate from it a bit...but not a lot. I'm looking to keep things simple. Here is a rundown of the current naming convention:

ABCDE-MM-DD-YYYY

Where the ABCDE is a 5 digit alphabetic code depending on the unit of the plant I work in. The MM,DD,YYYY is just the date the document was created. I'm sure there are better naming conventions out there but, like I said above, I'm trying to keep it simple. My original question is whether VBA programming, a macro, or some other means (which I'm not aware of) would be the best route for my goal.

[June7]

If you have a field with the plant unit ID and a field with document date, this unique identifier can be calculated when needed by concatenating the two fields. But is it really unique? Can a unit have more than one document created on the same date?

[dbakeg00]

That's the part of the numbering convention I would like to change. Probably by adding a unique modifier. If I go about it the way you suggest, I guess the best way would be to add some auto-number field to concatenate with the other data?

[June7]

Autonumber field probably easiest; however, not necessarily best. Autonumbers are supposed to be invisible to users, not part of data that has meaning to users. It's also possible for autonumber to generate negative (at least so I've heard, but never seen).

[dbakeg00]

So the more robust way would be to learn VBA and code the logic?

[June7]

Maybe - as noted, I've never seen autonumber do anything but positive increment and many do use as you describe.

Generating custom unique identifier is a common topic in forum.