No Duplicates allowed on Form

[Uncle Gizmo]

Would you be good enough to explain how you are creating the 2D barcodes? Is there particular software you found which is suitable? Is it free or paid for? We get frequent questions about barcodes and it would be nice to have such information available on the forum, particularly from someone that uses it everyday!

 

[Mtdew4243]

This reply is to both Uncle Gizmo and sneuberg. First sorry for the delay in responses and Thanks for all the information! Phase one of the project is now complete which is why I was absent for awhile. Phase two starts in two to three weeks so, I have already started to redesign my DB in a more traditional way. I should try to do it right.

Uncle, the barcode program is paid for but can be easily learned for the quick and dirty labels but also so sophisticated that it has features I haven't even scratched yet. you can link data to it in many ways, Access, Excel, tab del text... or if the label data doesn't change, make it right in the program. Made by Seagull Scientific it is called BarTender, I have the Pro version.

sneuberg, yes, my hope was for a brute force way of checking just the SN:'s. Because S/C is in its own field, I already have the Required set to Yes and the No Dup's turned on for it and it works great. The way I had my form set up it was very visual for the associate to see how he was progressing through the master case.

Just out of curiosity, was the brute force method you described checking just the fields on the active Form or also the data from a previous record. Just wondering if an associate was really trying to make an error and scanned the same barcode on two different records would it be caught the second time as well... if it was only entered once on the active Form.

What I really believe I need is to find a local group that occasionally gets together over a cup of coffee to discuss different DB projects. And to discuss the better way of designing DB's right from the beginning of table design.

Bed time here as well.

Thanks all!

 

[sneuberg]

Just out of curiosity, was the brute force method you described checking just the fields on the active Form or also the data from a previous record. Just wondering if an associate was really trying to make an error and scanned the same barcode on two different records would it be caught the second time as well... if it was only entered once on the active Form.

It only checks the active form. If you want to check the scanned serial number with all previous scanned numbers probably the best way to do that is to create a table with a single indexed (no duplicates) column for serial numbers the then inserting them into to this table as they are scanned. If a duplicate is scanned the attempted insertion with raise an error than can be trapped. I didn't do it that way because I didn't think you cared about the previous serial numbers and I believe my method is faster, albeit the time for a single record insertion would probably be acceptable. The tricky part of this might be incorporating the existing serial numbers in this check table. You could do that with a union query but you would need some code to strain out the duplicates if there are any.