Part of the Arev 3.12 system that I help maintain stores inventory items. Part of the information for an inventory item is the manufacturer's name and the manufacturer's part number of the particular whats-its that has been purchased. The users can't find itmes that do exist when they browse on some Catapillar part numbers because they are in the format of #E#### (for example 3E7886). The Arev system looks at this as a scientific notation number because of the 'E' and appears to index it differently than other part numbers which means we can't find it latter thru an index browse.

Is there any way that I can help my users to search on numbers like these? The ideal solution would be that they wouldn't have to do anything different for these part numbers than for the rest of the part numbers. I don't have the option of modifiying the part number in any way. Also as far as I know we don't use scientific notation in any of our fields in any of our tables.

Thank You,

Michael Slack

E-mail: [email protected]

There is a UDC called NUMTOCHAR_CONV. I looked around for it but couldn't find it anywhere. It might have been on CompuServe. Anyway, what it does is prefixes an x to the front of the value. That prevents it from being treated as a number.

Other option is to change the format of the key.

Sorry, but there's not much else to suggest.

[email protected]

Sprezzatura Ltd

The only thing I can think of off the top of my head is to do something kludgy like searching for values from "3E7885X" through "3E7886X". There are some possible pitfalls with this scheme, but, depending on your setup it could work for you.

The idea is to contatenate a character to make the system use the value as a string. Normally, I would suggest to concatenate a null (that way you wouldn't have to select a range but a single value), but I don't think it would work in this case. It's worth a try, though. Then, just select a range that is guaranteed to contain only the item you wish to find.

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