Auto Number

[LuffmanA]

Is there a way to create an attribute with an auto-number type (similar to Access)?

I need to number my documents and would like it to automatically assign a number for each item dropped into a specific folder.

Since the items are not necessarily stored chonologically, it is difficult to figure out what was the last number used.

Am I missing something easy?

Amei

[kevina]

A Database-wide 'System' auto-number attribute already exists (it is guaranteed to be unique within an Info Database).

You can see it by setting the ItemID system attribute to display @ Tools | Options | Attributes.

Of course this won't start with 1 at each indent of the Data Explorer Pane, but will increment chronologically.

There is another system 'auto-number' attribute that does start at 0 for each indent level (that currently can't be displayed) but it only gets populated when the children of an Info Item are manually sorted (in the Data Explorer Pane or Search Pane). Would this be helpful? If so we can look at exposing this as a new System attribute.

[LuffmanA]

The ItemID will work for now.

The ultimate goal (for me) is to have a way to number each indent differently and have that number print in the header when the embedded document is printed (would be lovely if it worked for linked ones as well but there are many fewer of these in my database).

We have about 6 separate indents with many entries. We are compiling reference material and research which relates to our product lines. There will eventually be several hundred items in each indent, maybe more.

What I would love to see is when you create a new item (we're using custom templates within each indent), the child would look at the template and see that 'Research' articles start their auto number with 'R' (first number in the series being R00001, or whatever), and assign an auto number of R000## based on how many articles were previously entered into this indent.

I could make a custom attribute assigning a 'prefix' to each template (each template is used mainly in one indent only) and use the 'auto number' you mention to create the rest.

Is there a way to make a custom attribute that will concatenate the values of 2 other attributes?

Like I said, that would be the ultimate solution for my situation. I don't know how useful it will be to other UR users.

Until a way can be figured out to make this happen, I will turn on the feature you mentioned and use that.

Now, if we could just get it to print in the header......... ;-)

Thanks,
AL