I am trying to create an application for work. The app will be used internally and should allow us to assign some barcode numbers to our product SKUs. I am using Visual Studio / Basic 2010 Express to build this as my very limited and beginners experience is with VS 2010 Express.
I'll give a bit of information about how I see this application working and then I'll get on with my actual question:
I see the app allowing us to create a new Product in the database by a user entering the SKU and description of the product and then the app will assign this product the next available base number for the barcode and from there the app will (if required) generate the correct EAN13 and GTIN14 barcodes and store them against that SKU.
As a company we have a large range of barcode numbers we can use and we have split this large range up so that the first 50,000 (for example) are for our EAN13 codes, the next 50K are for our GTIN14 codes for Inner Cartons and the remaining 50K are for Master Cartons.
So in order to achieve this I have my Product table which contains the fields 'SKU', 'Description' and 'BarcodeBase'. I have managed to set the BarcodeBase field as unique and I am attempting to use AutoIncrement(Seed & Step) to make sure that this assigns the product a base barcode (before I calculate the check digit) that falls within the EAN13 range as described above...
So finally my question is: Is there a way I can put an upper limit on AutoIncrement so that on the off chance, way way in the future, the base barcode number will not overflow into the next range?
I've been googling unsuccessfully for an answer and I am only coming across things which talk about the data type of the field having a limit. For example the upper limit of an Int32 type. Through my searches I have become vaguely aware of the 'Expression' property of the field and also the possibility of coding a partial class - but I don't know if that is the right direction to go in or if there is something much simpler that I am overlooking / have not found.
I would really appreciate any help!
Edit: As per GrandMasterFlush's comment - I have added a local database to my VS project. So I think I am using a SQL Server Compact 3.5 db.