Question: How does a sequential field in custom tables work?
Product Details:
Product Family: Act!
Product: Act! Premium Plus
Version: v20.1
Answer:
Custom table Sequential Fields, available exclusively to Act! Premium Plus subscribers, allow you to create a field that will automatically populate the next number in a sequence when creating a record. This functionality is also known as auto-numbering. An example of how this would be useful would be if you have a customer service team who needs to use Act! to log their interactions with your customer base so that it can be referenced later by the customer themselves. You could create a custom table called “Interactions”, and a field called "Interaction ID”, then configure the field to be a Sequential Field so that each time you create a new record in the “Interactions” table, the number value in the “Interaction ID” field will increase by an increment of one value higher than the record created before it. The following settings can be configured for Sequential Fields:
Using the example given above, where you wish to track interaction numbers, you could use “INT_” as the Prefix, with an Initial Value of 1, and set the Minimum Digits to 5 to make it so that the first record you create in your “Interactions” table would be INT_00001. The second record would be INT_00002, and so on.
Information regarding Sequential Fields in a remote database
Remote databases are unable to keep track of current sequence of numbers in the main (publisher) database. For this reason, sequential fields in remote databases will be assigned a random prefix to ensure they are not duplicates. These prefixes can be changed by the remote user later:
For information on how to create custom fields within a custom table, refer to the following knowledgebase article:
How to create and manage custom table fields
Product Details:
Product Family: Act!
Product: Act! Premium Plus
Version: v20.1
Answer:
Custom table Sequential Fields, available exclusively to Act! Premium Plus subscribers, allow you to create a field that will automatically populate the next number in a sequence when creating a record. This functionality is also known as auto-numbering. An example of how this would be useful would be if you have a customer service team who needs to use Act! to log their interactions with your customer base so that it can be referenced later by the customer themselves. You could create a custom table called “Interactions”, and a field called "Interaction ID”, then configure the field to be a Sequential Field so that each time you create a new record in the “Interactions” table, the number value in the “Interaction ID” field will increase by an increment of one value higher than the record created before it. The following settings can be configured for Sequential Fields:
- Prefix – Characters that are automatically entered into the Sequential Field before the values that will be sequential.
- Suffix – Characters that are automatically entered into the Sequential Field after the values that will be sequential.
- Initial Value – The value that the sequential numbering will begin on
- Minimum Digits – The minimum number of digits that you require each number to be
Using the example given above, where you wish to track interaction numbers, you could use “INT_” as the Prefix, with an Initial Value of 1, and set the Minimum Digits to 5 to make it so that the first record you create in your “Interactions” table would be INT_00001. The second record would be INT_00002, and so on.
Information regarding Sequential Fields in a remote database
Remote databases are unable to keep track of current sequence of numbers in the main (publisher) database. For this reason, sequential fields in remote databases will be assigned a random prefix to ensure they are not duplicates. These prefixes can be changed by the remote user later:
- In the remote database, click Custom Tables > Sequential field Settings
- Use the list of sequential fields in the database to change the random prefix
For information on how to create custom fields within a custom table, refer to the following knowledgebase article:
How to create and manage custom table fields