>>Mike
>>
>>again I am fully with you. It indeed strikes me that so often people stumble over a mal formatted application and therefor not being able to do the most normal things, they instead of correcting the basic error, fight with themselves and hurt the brains to find a palliative solution. .
>
>Life is tough. Frequently, you just can't touch the original code. It's in Access. It's lost. It's under a password and the writer is in jail/hospital/dead. But the database is open, it's on SQL or wherever, and you can, and are required to, write code to fix things in the database.
>
>Often, in the first round of such fixes, you need to show what you can do, to impress the customer and/or keep the job/gig/contract, so you do quick and ugly, while gaining more insight into them spaghetti and planning for as much overhaul as makes sense. Most of the time, it's better to write new than wash, but the customer wants some results right away. So it goes.
>
>>This case is a beautiful example for that.
>>What is now so difficult to alter a structure (add an ID) and make an index?
>
>As long as I don't have to touch others' spaghetti, and can do that in a routine that runs outside of that forest, I'd do that in a microjiffy. Actually, did such things many times.
>
>>By the way when you add this field I would also add straight away an integer field Sequence. So users can sequence to their needs.
>
>If there's a need for that, or if that would make the users happier, so would I. If they don't really care (the list may be passed to another machine, not humans), I see no need to put gold plating on a styrofoam cup.

Just a thought. A styrofoam cup could never exist if someone did not "goldplate" the process of making a cup in the first place.