>got m'self a cheap and cheerful (and effective) stored procedure for assigning primary keys which is called from the default value for the relevant field.
>
>It works for "append blank" or "insert into" but not for "append from"
>
>I can see that "append from" may, of course, add a whole bunch of records and thus call the routine a whole bunch of times. But a) I've never come across anything that says it can't be done that way and b) if it is going to fall over I'd have expected to fall over at the second appended record. It doesn't even manage one.
>
>what have I missed? and, if it can't be done that way for "Append From", how else can we do it?
>
>Harry

Really, APPEND FROM is used to pull in large quantities of data at one time. If you are doing an operation like this, you are better off appending the records then scanning back through them and assigning the keys.