Give each EPDM project its own part numbering scheme

A few weeks ago I was at a customer’s site where they wanted each of their projects files to have their own serial number. i.e. They wanted part numbers for project “A” to be “0010”, “0011”, “0012”, “0013”, etc. and part numbers for project “B” to “10456”, “10457”, “10458”… [Not the file name, just the part number.] Each of their customers had their own part number schema that they were to follow.

My first thought was to make a new serial number and data card for each project….but I really didn’t like the overhead of having a whole bunch of data cards that they would have to maintain just because the default value of one field would have to be different for each project.

Playing around with PigeonHole, I found this little trick. If PigeonHole finds the name of a serial number enclosed inside of # symbols, it will replace the name with the next value from that serial number. Knowing that, plus the fact that I can use variable values found elsewhere on a data card, a simple SQL statement like this:

SELECT '#' + '{Project Number}' + '#'

was all I needed to use to allow them to have a serial number based on the project. The only real trick is that you need to ensure the value on the data card matches the name of the serial number.

In the example above and in the video below, “Project Number” is the name of a variable in the data card which also corresponds with my serial number names.

[youtube]http://youtu.be/W5voQWGhqqM[/youtube]

This would also work if you wanted the part number counter to start over for each new project.