[AccessD] Random numbers lottery-style

Susan Harkins ssharkins at bellsouth.net
Thu Mar 3 14:08:58 CST 2005


Steve, I'm not sure what you're trying to do, but I once had produce a
random set of records, based on different subsets -- I found it extremely
difficult to work out all the kinks because there were so many conditions
but in a nutshell, I ran a query to produce each subset, added a Rnd() to
the subset, sorted on the Rnd(), and grabbed the top n number of records.
Wasn't perfect, but it worked. Unfortunately, it was very slow. I ended up
flagging the "selected" records and then running a Make Table on the flagged
records, which did improve things a bit, but it never was a performance
winner for me, but then, I was working with a ton of data, so I'm not sure
anything would've been fast. 

Susan H. 

Perry,

Are you talking about examining the recordset every time a new ActivityID is
randomly selected for the current Volunteer before a new row is added? That
should work. I guess I'm looking for something a bit more general purpose;
that is, a function that returns a number from a given list while removing
the number from the list for the next go round.

Thanks,

Steve Erbach

On Thu, 3 Mar 2005 14:29:53 -0500, Perry Harold <pharold at proftesting.com>
wrote:
> Steve
> 
> How adding a check to see if the ActivityID is already in the selected 
> list
> - then cycle around and run the randomizer again until there's not a
match?
> 
> Perry Harold
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