>Great comments, Garrett! I'll use it. Currently, this is for a
>rehabilitation practice that has 4 digits in the client id field.
>I hadn't automatically assigned the id yet because usually in a
>practice or facility environment, the case # is assigned on the
>fly by a receptionist (manually using a chart).

The president of the Fox User Group in Bangor gave a talk about a nursing home
package that she had been working on: one of the requirements was that there
were _no_ client id numbers: all patients had to be referred to by name.
Of course, this is only practical when you're dealing with (in this case) 90
records tops...

>However, reading your note made me remember not to ASSume anything.
>I'll put a call in to them Monday to see if they want the product to
>assign the codes.

That's not _quite_ what I meant. The primary keys I assign are never
seen by the user. The user generally assigns a candiate id manually.
This one actually _could_ be FOSTEDON01. Since the primary key is 185423,
and this is the value that's stored in all tables referencing PatientID,
we can change FOSTEDON01 to FITZGEDON01 in the Patient table, and not
have to make any further changes.

As I indicated before, USE AGAIN is a workable way to check for duplicate
IDs, until Tahoe comes along with INDEXSEEK()....