Thanks for both of your replies I received another reply and they
suggested making it into a date. I'm going to try those ideas.......

These Serial Numbers actually pertain to customer farecards serial
numbers encoded on them that they use on the bus & subways here in new
york city and the problems occurred suddenly in the 2140000000 &
2150000000 ranges, until we found the breakpoint where it actually
happened.
It even happened on the IBM Mainframe until they redefined the field
and expanded it a digit which we cant do in Filemaker!!!

I had another idea of using Excel to create the sequences and copy &
pasting them into Filemaker but it didnt work either. Also another
idea of making it like a formula in a Excel cell..

I'm probably meeting my Filemaker users group in NYC Tonite and they
might have some alternatives also

George

On 2/10/2011 6:51 AM, George Lewycky wrote:
User-defined data really shouldn't be used as a unique serial number,
but that's another matter at this point.

I would change that field to be a text field.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Howard Schlossberg
FM Professional Solutions, Inc. Los Angeles

FileMaker Certified Developer
Associate Member, FileMaker Business Alliance

Howard Schlossberg wrote :
That looks like the limit of an 8 byte number since it translates to
7FFFFFFF where one more bit in the leftmost byte would make it a
negative number.
Numbers would never need to be bigger than that nor would we need more
than 640 kbytes of main storage.(Who said that?)
As a humble user of FM but some experience years ago at the machine
code level of earlier machines thats my guess.

--
John G

George Lewycky has brought this to us :

I would like to know what your original problem was. I have not been
able to find your earlier correspondance.

Numbers displayed in GENERAL format change to being displayed as
Scientific at 2147483648, that is 2.1475e+09

Numbers displayed in AS ENTERED format do not change and are
displayed as entered. There may be some limitations in searching,
sorting and indexing past 16 digits but I am not sure.

--
John G

Hi everyone & thanks for your feedback:

we have farecards and the field in question is actually its 10-digit
serial number which are sequential.
In a nutshell we reached the maximum value of the 10 digit numeric
field that Filemaker can compute with.
And once we add past that number the results are coming back negative.

I know we have an old version and yes we dont have every single serial
number on the database
We are in the midst of replacing it with SQL Server and Visual Basic
and the Filemaker application has alot of bells and whistles and this
problem came up on other systems but they were able to add a digit and/
or remove the sign bit but we dont have that capability now.

email me at george.lewycky (AT) nyct (DOT) com and ill send you screen prints
illustrating it more

I was just at my FM users group in NY City last nite and they
suggested using 2 global containers and compute it that way among
other ideas.........

George

In article
<6feee9f0-4376-4500-8814-288cbffa17ad (AT) x17g2000yqa (DOT) googlegroups.com>,
George Lewycky <grlewycky (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:

I don't know about the limitations on the old version of FileMaker that
you are using.


The specs for FileMaker 11 say that number fields can deal with 400
(four hundred) significant digits. See
http://help.filemaker.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/7541

You might think a little harder about moving away from FileMaker, and
instead consider upgrading to FileMaker Pro 11 and FileMaker Server 11.

--
Bill Collins

Bill wrote on 13/02/2011 :
Just to close out this problem.
Older versions of FM, at least Ver 5 and earlier, seem to use a 4 byte
integer in the calculation of serial numbers to insert in the REplace
Field Contents with Serial Number.
This fails at 2147483647 plus one.
All other arithmetic and number storage appears to use Real or Floating
point math and so works fine.

Can't test Ver 6 and 7 but later versions calculate the result
correctly.

--
John G

Martin ?rautmann expressed precisely :
No, current Filemaker can deal with 800 digit numbers but only indexes
400.
Credit cards are not numbers. They are 3 or 4 seperate fields with
dashes between and if you strip the dashes and do any math you will
have an invalid credit card number.
The biggest Credit card number I have seen is 15 digits and 3 dashes
and even FM 2.1v3 could handle 16 digits but as I said you cannot do
math on credit card numbers.

--
John G

Martin ?rautmann explained :
But they do not do any math, jusst text functions to split them up if
they want them to look nice

http://help.filemaker.com/app/answer...w/text%20limit

In FM 8 Words can be indexed to 100 characters and text fields up to
800 Characters and numbers to 400 digits

http://books.google.com/books?id=L3q...mits& f=false

I have not tested these limits , not enough time.

--
John G

It happens that Martin ?rautmann formulated :
originally counted AMEX which is of the form 3760-xxxxxx-yyyyy which is
15 digits at least here in australia.

--
John G