Dan,

The most reliable way to do this is to have a table with one record for each number you want to generate. So if you need invoice numbers and customer numbers the table would have two records. Each records has two fields, "type" and "LastUsed." You can write a function to return a unique number that looks something like this:

FUNCTION GetNo
LPARAMETERS cType

IF !USED('numlist')
  USE numlist IN 0
ENDIF
SELECT numlist
LOCATE FOR numlist.Type=m.cType

DO WHILE !RLOCK()
ENDDO

m.nNextNum=numlist.LastUsed+1
REPLACE numlist.LastUsed WITH m.nNextNum
UNLOCK

RETURN m.nNextNum

It's important that you get the lock before you increment the number. This will prevent another user from incrementing it at the same time and getting the same number. You'll probably also want to make sure that you change the work area back to the one in effect before the function was called.

>Does anyone have a way of creating a truly, truly unique number to use as an identification for a record in Foxpro 2.6a? We have several people writing to a dbf and when they create a record in the dbf it puts a unique (or so we thought using sys(3)) number in a field. We are running these programs on P6-300's. We have also tried val(sys(3))+recno number of file+1. This also has not proved to be unique. Can anyone help us???