> it's sort of a formal document management system. the assigned gapless numbers > are frozen at the end of each month. until then, an authorized user will be > able to delete a document. but ... Another way of dealing with this is to keep the association between the number and the document it was originally assigned to, and present instead of the document a message "document deleted", possibly with date & time & user. Whether you actually delete the document or not, is a detail dependent on the use case. -- Scott Ribe scott_ribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://www.killerbytes.com/ (303) 722-0567 voice