At 08:46 PM 3/7/2006, Kevin Murphy wrote:
I'm trying to set up an ID field that works like this for news
articles that are posted to a website.
2006-03-05a
2006-03-05b
I know how to generate the date, and I am pretty sure I can generate
the letter code based on counting the number of rows and then
assigning the next letter (we will never have more than 26 in a
day... usually its closer to 1 or 2 per day).
The problem is if there has been something deleted.
2006-03-05a
2006-03-05c
If I then Count the rows with this date I get an answer of 2, and so
the next letter should be "c" but there already is a "c" because "b"
got deleted.
So, is there any way of generating this style ID number automatically?
--
Kevin Murphy
Webmaster - Information and Marketing Services
Western Nevada Community College
www.wncc.edu
(775) 445-3326
Why make it so HARD??????
Having gone that far, just timestamp your id. Not a timestamp in the sense
of it being triggered whenever a record was changed, but the time it
was created.
Better yet - use your publish date and assign a sequence number to the
article. Doesn't matter what the number is, but you can then use it to
roughly - or accurately - sequence articles for publication. If articles
have same sequence number they'll appear in whatever order they were added
to the database.
For a count of the articles, just count(pub_date).
And yes, if you insist, you can generate the number automatically. Just
establish a table for id values. It has two fields, table_name and id_value.
Write a function to grab the current id_value, then increment and store it.
Note grab first, then increment and store. I still think this is much more
work than you need.
Regards - Miles Thompson
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