It has been a tradition in DataEase to use Sequence From to create a unique Record Identifier. This is not a good idea as Sequence From will not be allocated to the record until the record is saved, and it can also cause problems if the sequencer loose track of itself. 

UniquedID is created to insure that a developer can uniquely name and identify a record.

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One of the most popular and frustrating functions or should we rather say functionalities in DataEase is "Sequence from".

Basically this is a "guaranteed" sequence number, and it is great when you need records to be in sequence and have a unique number. Problem is that if to people register data in the same table at the same time, the Sequence number you get when you start typing into your record, might not be the one the record ending up having when it is saved.

The Sequence number you get when you start registering is the highest available at that time, and the same goes when you hit save, but in the meantime someone else might have saved a record and the next available is hence one higher, or many numbers higher. The uniqueness and the sequence is preserved, but if you have use the Sequence number to derive, link etc..you are in the sh....t.

The truth is that in most cases where we use Sequence From, we are simply looking for a unique key and not a sequence, so wouldn't it be better if we had a true Unique Key generator?

In PRISM 9 (The next prism version after this) all records will have an automatic unique ID, but for now we must do it manually.

Enters: UniqueID() which returns a 16 character long guaranteed unique Key.

The result will look like this: B40EHNT8Q92445WX or 953V8Z0IOV9NB5JZ etc.

Make sure your Unique field is 16 characters long and text, or you might find that it is not unique after all ;-)