Search options for Number field treat it as a string, not a number

[David Carlson]

On 5/10/2013 2:55 AM, Michael Hendry wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> For consistency with TAS Books, the book-keeping software I used for many years before switching to Ubuntu and GnuCash, I allocate a unique transaction number to all manually-entered transactions, and file the paper documents that go with them in that order. (I mentioned this in the thread entitled "Generating a unique transaction number" in 2011).
>
> Online purchases tend not to generate paper receipts, but to a cascade of e-mails (Order acknowledgement, despatch date, adjustment of consignment because one item isn't available, etc), so I tend to wait for the credit card statement to come in, and enter the transactions while reconciling, marking the transaction number on the statement. If I have any doubt about the transaction, I can go through the trail of e-mails to check it.
>
> The result of this is that I can't just add 1 to the transaction number on the top of my pile of receipts to get a unique number for a new transaction in any of several different bank or credit card accounts.
>
> I thought I should be able to use Edit=>Find and select Number >=117894 (for example)  to find out if the top receipt was the most recently numbered transaction, but the options are "contains", "matches regex" and "does not match regex".
>
> I appreciate that the Number column is allowed to contain alphabetic as well as numeric characters (which annuls the value of the "+" key to get the next number in the sequence).
>
> I've worked around the problem by using "Contains" 11789 (as in the above example), but this has obvious flaws.
>
> Can anyone suggest a more reliable way of determining the highest number used in the Number field of any register?
>
> Michael
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If you go to the trouble to learn about regular expressions and how to
use them, you can learn how to build a query equivalent to "any number
greater than 2000", for example.  However, I am an old fogey that does
not know how to do it.  There are many good references on the Internet.

David C