Iterating through 10! combinations (1 Viewer)

I have ten records each of which can be assigned a value from one to ten, but no two records can hold the same value so there are ten factorial combination.

What I need to do is come up with a procedure to iterate through each of those 10! combinations (yes that's 3,628,800). I'm having trouble getting my head around the logic to do this, so any help or suggestions will be gratefully accepted

As back ground each record represents a row in a grid and each the value held in that record represents the column in the grid, and the combination of the record and the value it holds will give me the address of a cell in the grid that hold a numeric value.

Random thoughts only :

Use ten variables and iterate through each in nested loops counting down from ten.
The subloops should stop when they get to 1

j = 10
For z = j To 1 Step -1
For y = z -1 To 1 Step -1
etc

intIndex = z*y*x*w*v*u*t*s*r*q

myBigArray(intIndex) = whatever

Thanks, I'll have a play with that

JBB - try this thread - the general solution for evaluating combinations and permutations is to use recursion ...

combine n items by taking 1 items and then applying the combine function to the remaining n-1 items.

ie - if you have 10 items, but want to select every group of 6 items from those 10 -
the general formula is n! /( (n-r)! * r! ) - where n is no of items, and r is no to be selected

there is also something in the code/sample library on the same topic, started by ajetrumpet, which I put similar stuff in.

http://www.access-programmers.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=205563&highlight=permutations


if you are sure you want every combination, then G's idea will obviously work for this special case.

Thanks Dave I'll take a look at that in the morning