Adding field to give unique ID to documents

I know sequential numbering is appealing for its orderliness. But it's not as simple as just writing a formula, and you have to make some compromises in your application to make it work. Consider what happens when Ted creates a request, and still hasn't saved it when Julia composes her request. You would need a way of flagging a number as already assigned so that Julia doesn't get the same one. What if Ted is working in a local replica with no Internet access to communicate to the server that he's using up a number, or a different server replica where it takes time for the fact that he's used a number to replicate to Julia's server? What if Ted and Julia are both using the same server, and they both compose a request at nearly the same moment, so that between the time Ted calculates which number is his and he marks that number used, Julia grabs that same number? What if Ted changes his mind and doesn't save his request, and Julia does save hers -- is it okay to have a gap in the numbering sequence?

Go to http://www.lotus.com/ldd and in the Forum FAQs you will find extensive information on ways to uniquely identify documents . . .including numbering them sequentially if you decide that's really necessary.