appending records / turning off autonumber

[MontyBurns]

Hi,

I'm being brought in on a project very shortly, and all I know is the following:

* There are 2 identical Access 97 (soon to be 2000) DBs.
* Two departments hold info in these relating to hard-copy files that they are in charge of updating.
* The hard-copy files have moved to the other dept, and so the records need to be moved to the other departments instance of the DB.

I have a feeling that one of the issues which is concerning those who have already looked at the problem is that of needing to keep the IDs of the records which are moving.

Is there a way to turn off the Autonumber property of a field once data is already in the table? Is it as simple as changing it in the table designer? Are there any problems I should be aware of?

Any advice anyone has would be much appreciated.

Thanks,
Burns

 

[allanon]

I do not know if there is a way to do what you ask BUT if you have the freedom to make some slight modifications what you could do is add an ID field that is just a number and have a autonumber field called key. when you create a new record store the key in the id field. From then on this id will be the record's ID. An autonumber field is a difficult thing to use as an identifier. With this system then the key value could change and it would not matter. I don't know if this helps you but this would be the first option that I would look at.

 

[MontyBurns]

cheers allanon - didn't think there was much I could do. When I actually get to look at the DB maybe i'll come up with something.

Burns