User defined table usage

Question

Dear Experts,
I would appriciate your advice on the sales budget screen that I am currently woking on.
the screen contains a matrix with a cfl on the product group column and a couple of columns stand for  sale figures for each  month.
this screen will be called form the BP form. so i would pass the selected BP code to my form.
I am not sure whether a user defined table is the answer to this job.
if i add productGroup,productCode,cardcode,Jan,Feb, ...  user defined fields to this table then the system will add Code and Name fields automatically to this table, if the userdeined table is the right way to go for this job, what values i should held for the code and name fields considering both of these fields are stand alone primary key fields.
Many thanks.
Maryam.

Answer 1

I usually load the same value into both fields, but since the code field is only eight bytes its kind of limiting.  If you don't have any information to load in the table that would be unique, like a date or year field, (or your product code if its less than 9 bytes & will be unique) then a sequential number works fine.  There are threads on this forum that show different ways to do it, but one way is basically to select max(code) from the table, convert the value to numeric, add one to it and then use it as the value for both fields.
Here's a link to a thread I posted with some code on the specifics of assigning the next sequential number as code and name:
[Re: Unique Value in Code and Name]
Edited by: John Chadwick on Sep 18, 2009 2:53 PM