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Auto-generated unique Id for a certain field ?

satpal

Hello,

Is it possible to have a read-only field in DCT that generates a unique sequential id for the forms under a certain Data Type ?
Consider a Data Capture form where information for a new employee is to be entered. Here employee id should be auto generated field.
For e.g. If last employee id was 1017, then the field should have read-only value of '1018' in the new form.
Kindly note that no data is not stored in database (i.e. no metadata specified).
Is it possible to achieve this by accessing DB from DCF and reading a sequential value (which is not a Metadata value) ?
Let me know if there is any other alternative solution.

Thanks and Regards,
Satish.

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Comments

Jeremy

Hi Satish,

One idea could be to have an inline callout to a Perl script that would get a number for a text file stored locally, increment it and save it back to the text file, so that the number is always one up and "remembered". You may have to be careful of many users trying to open a new DCR at the same time, so would have to have some kind of security like locking the file while reading and writing.

There might be a way to do a similar thing with Javascript and FormAPI, but I would rather do it in Perl.

I am sure others will give you more idea's too.

HTH

Jeremy

Adam Stoller

I haven't done this myself, so I don't know the details - but I believe you want to have either an inline or cgi-callout to a DB to retrieve a sequential id/number from a specific counter.

These threads don't contain too much more detail - but they might give you references to contact regarding what *they* did for their implementations...

Unique ID generation for an DCR
Creating a unique ID?
Random Number in a DCR

Hope that helps

--fish
Senior Consultant, Quotient Inc.
http://www.quotient-inc.com

chart_colors.rptdesign

iwovGraduate

Heres an example of inline which gets the next ID from a file.


#------------------------------------------------------------------------#
#!../../iw-perl/bin/iwperl

use strict;
use Fcntl qw(EFAULT :flock);

my($ofh, $num);
my($sequencefile) = "D:/iw-home/custom/bin/DoNotModifyMe.seq";

sysopen(FH, "$sequencefile", O_RDWR | O_CREAT) or die "can't open numfile: $!";
# autoflush FH
$ofh = select(FH); $| = 1; select ($ofh);
flock(FH, LOCK_EX) or die "can't write-lock numfile: $!";

$num = <FH> || 0;
seek(FH, 0, 0) or die "can't rewind numfile : $!";
print FH $num+1, "\n" or die "can't write numfile: $!";

truncate(FH, tell(FH)) or die "can't truncate numfile: $!";
close(FH) or die "can't close numfile: $!";  

chomp $num;
print <<END;
<substitution>
<default>
END
printf ("%08d", $num);
print <<END;
</default>
</substitution>
END
#------------------------------------------------------------------------#

And heres the snippet for datacapture.cfg


<!-- ============================================ -->
<item name="ID">
    <description>Unique ID</description>
    <label>ID</label>
    <text size="10">
    <inline command="D:/iw-home/iw-perl/bin/iwperl /iw-home/custom/bin/counter.ipl"/>
    </text>
</item>
<!-- ============================================ -->

Enjoy

satpal

Thanks for your replies.
The information provided is really useful.
The perl code provided is also working fine.

Satish.