Sorry Bob, I should have started a new topic for my question rather than jumping into yours.

In another thread, I said:
Quote:

To which Bob replied:
Quote:

Mine is a number field.  I have no idea why my "99999999" is in quotes, but the button seems to work (looks up the last saved customer code and increases the code by one).  I'm not fully comfortable with the XLookup commands and must have had help with this one, so perhaps I wrote it wrong in the process.  I'll take the quotes out if they shouldn't be there, or if it will work better without them.   I hope someone reading this can give some advice, and in the meantime I'll experiment.

One thing I wonder about...if I have multiple users accessing this database and adding customer records, is duplication of codes possible if one of them pushes the "Assign Code" button but delays saving the record until after another user has done the same thing?  If so I'll need to figure out a way to check for a unique value when saving.  Currently my programming doesn't do this.

Back to the Forum archives!  I'm sure this has been discussed before.

Thank you...but I'm still a bit confuzzled.  I hear you saying that it doesn't really matter in this instance because Sesame will interpret the string correctly in either case but performance will be a tiny bit better by using the quotes so it doesn't have to convert.  Gotcha.  So mine is a tiny bit better than Bob's, but both do the same thing.  Is that right?

What's confusing is that I'm not looking an exact match to "99999999" (as a text string) but a number in the range of all numbers less than 99999999.

But Sesame returns the retreived number as a text string...so that's why I have to use ToNumber, yes?  The parts are starting to come together but my brain is fighting me today.  I should have drank more beer in college, smoothed out some of those cerebral wrinkles, then I wouldn't have this problem.

The book is a bit confusing about this, too, because some of the examples show the Key in quotes and some are without.  I think my main objective (in this thread) is to lock down the idea and definition of the Key.

A you said, it doesn't really (as in functionally) make much difference. If the key LE is a numeric, and you specify a numeric argument (even though the parameter type is string):

1. SBasic converts the number 999999 into a string.
2. Passes the string "999999" to the actual function.
3. The "real" XLookup function checks the field type of the field bound to the key LE - if it is numeric, it converts the string "999999" into the number 999999.0.
4. That number is compared to the numeric field value in the target field (in the matching record type records) using a numeric comparison.
5. If they have the same numeric value, the return value is (if need be) converted to a string and returned.

If you pass in a key value in quotes, Sesame can skip step one. 99.99% of the time is spent on step 4.