>Thanks for the ideas. I would like the users to be able to add to the code lists. What's the best way to do this assuming I stick with the one "allcodes" table? Should I keep another table to store the last unique i.d. for each type of code to then increment by 1?? Or just use the main "allcodes" table to sort by codetype+code then increment that code by 1?? I'm beginning to fry my brain on this project ;^).
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>And Paul, one of the reasons I migrated from the 25 individual tables to a single code table was that I was having trouble creating my data environment for my forms (VFP 3.0). I was getting messages telling me I couldn't add any more tables to the environment (I think I had about 20+ tables per form...to work with my page frames full of data).
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>Many thanks!
>Mandy

i usually just use one unique id that could be between 1 and 999,999,999 (most of my projects don't use that many codes). this would mean that the codes wouldn't make any sense to anyone viewing a table, but they'd be unique.