Bret ---

For that matter, if space is a concern, why not go to a hexadecimal standard?
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B,C,D,E,F,10....I think you're potentially asking for trouble if you try to use upper/lower case distinctions.



>I have made auto-incrementing keyfields before, using the system in TASTRADE. What would be a good system for auto-incrementing while having each "digit" cycle through a-z, or maybe 0-9 and a-z, or maybe A-Z and then a-z? Doing this would increase the number of available values. It would be useful to me because I have a legacy app, written using data from other people's legacy apps, which has a meaningful keyfield which is only five characters long, and always starts with a digit. Now they want to allow blank values in this field, and we don't feel like rewriting the whole thing. I propose to generate values always starting with a letter, which would appear as blank in reports.