In an earlier comment I was wondering the following:
"Historically many of the items in our collection have codes that end with a field that is not just a number, but a number followed by a letter or a range of letters, like 78a or 287a-e. For now, I have set this field to serial and then just added the letter. Collectiveaccess is fine with that, although I do get an error message. Just wondering If there perhaps is a way to set a field to a number + one letter (78a) or a range of letters (287a-e) that does not create a warning/error?"
In the meantime I noticed that after using a range of entry codes 2023.1a etc, the next code that SERIAL gives is not the entry code 2023.2 as I would have expected. Instead it falls back to 2023.1, presumably because SERIAL cannot order the list anymore. The same happens if there is any letter in a series of entries. So, with 2023.1, 2023.1a, and 2023.2, SERIAL still gives 2023.1 as the next one up. Is there a way to fix this?
By way of one solution, is it possible to let SERIAL be alphanumeric such that the ordered list 2023.1, 2023.1a, 2023.1b, ... ,2023.1z, ..., 2023.1aa, 2023.1ab, ..., 2023.1zz, 2023.2 etc is a sequence of consecutive entries? This would work for my purposes. The only issue that I see is that if I have a set of three items with entries 2023.1a, 2023.1b and 2023.1c, then the next entry would be 2023.1d, even though I might want to have 2023.2. I could live with that, especially since with the next one up that I would expect, 2023.1a would be followed by 2023.2, so if I have a 2023.1b, I would have to change the numbering too.
Thanks,
Eisso
