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Mubeezi Micah 
Dear Richard,

I am having a bit of difficulty figuring out something. I got customer who has 16 health facilities. All these facilities enroll patients on long term treatment (6 months+). However at the end of the quarter, he combines all the data generated from these facilities to make one report to his supervisor.

I am struggling now to think how these different locations will enter data in their databases and then i merge it eventually without duplication of the primary keys. Constant internet access between these health facilities is not a realistic dream in the very near future. How have you handled customers like this one? How do make data from each health facility unique?

Please advice me

MICAH


Reply from Richard Rost:

You're going to have to change the key fields when you import them. It's going to be more of a manual process, but it's certainly doable.

Let's say you have just two databases with customers and orders. Both databases are going to have customer #1, #2, #3, and so on and Order #1, #2, #3, etc. In order to merge them, you'll need to write a routine that basically does this:

- Import a customer
- Take note of the old ID and new assigned ID
- Import all of the orders for this customer, changing CustomerID to new ID
- Repeat

It's going to be a longer process, and you're going to need recordsets to do it, but it shouldn't be that hard. If you'd like, I can add this to the list for an upcoming short seminar.

Remember, the important thing here is that ONLY ACCESS should care about what those autonumbers are. So if you use them for ANYTHING ELSE except maintaining your table relationships, then STOP doing that.

If you need a way to make sure you have a unique identifier for every customer that's PERSISTENT and never changes, then you should pick some kind of a real-world identifier like phone number, email address (which is what I use in my customer database), social security number, or some other key you make up yourself that's guaranteed to be unique. Don't rely on Autonumbers.

As far as how to PHYSICALLY transfer those records back and forth, you could use the techniques shown in my Web Synch Seminar to have each facility transfer their records whenever they CAN connect to the Internet, and then you can pull them down into your master database (or leave the master database online).

This thread is now CLOSED. If you wish to comment, start a NEW discussion in Access Forum.
 

 
 
 

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