>Right now I use a call to a stored procedure in the DBC
>to get the next sequential primary key (PK). The technique
>I am using is nearly the same as that used in the TasTrade
>app supplied with VFP - nothing fancy.
>
>Why is it that the auto incrementation is not contained
>inside the DBF header? The RECCOUNT() value is returned
>from and updated in the header. Seems like adding an
>additional column (like done with whether a column can
>accept .NULL. values) to ID the PK would be fairly easy
>to do. Also, an additional 4 bytes of space in the header
>can contain the 0 - 2,000,000,000+ values when using
>integer keys.
>
>Just curious why this has not been done before. I recall
>that trying to add a PK via ASP was not possible. At least
>not the way I tried it. Since the integer surrogate PK value
>would be totally encapsulated within the DBF header that
>problem would go away.
>
>Seems like this would be a nice feature to add to VFP 7...

Auto Increment fields (PKs for example) have been requested since VFP 3.0, so it is not an unknown thing.