Account Number

L

Lee Taylor-Vaughan

Hello,

What is the best way to generate an account number

The record set is based upon a users demographics
i.e. Fname, LName, Middle Name, DOB, PHone Number, SSN, Email address, etc..
(not all users enter their SSN), what is the best way based upon on above
Ie.. create an ascii value,
use an autonumber (i was told never to user autonumbers for account, why is
this?)


please post what protocols you have found to be best to create an account
number for a record.

thanks

Lee
 
S

Steve Schapel

Lee,

It depends on what your purpose is. If you need to have some way of
uniquely identifying each record in your table, then an AutoNumber is a
fine way to achieve this. This is especially so if you will have
related records in other tables in your database. If you want to use
this value for identification or reference purposes, then I personally
also favour AutoNumbers for this, though there are others who would
disagree with me, for fairly obscure reasons, on this. However, if you
need to have some control over the actual value of the account number,
or if there is a chance you will ever want to use Replicas of the
database, or if it matters if there is a gap in the number sequence,
then an AutoNumber is not applicable. In this case, it may serve your
purposes to use VBA procedure, or Default Value property, to assign your
own number to this field, a common approach to this being to use
DMax("[AccountNumber]","YourTable")+1
 
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