and what do you do with jim smith and joe smith and jill smith?

--
Don Guillett
SalesAid Software

"Katie" wrote in message
...
Hello folks-

I'm going to be trying to perform a task that I'm not sure if it's
possible,
so i'm not looking for someone to write it for me, I just wanted to know
if
something similar had already been written that I could get some
perspective
from. Thank you in advance if you can point me to this!

I have a list of existing users (20,000+) in our application - and when
new
users come in, we have to see if they already exist in the system by
matching
name and 'group' - and if they do, we would assign them their existing id,
if
we don't, we would assign them a new id.

The ids are generated simply by using first initial and last name, (I.E.
JSmith for John Smith) and if there is already a "jsmith" then we would
append with a 1 to make it "jsmith1" and so on. (jsmith2, jsmith3, etc.)

Does anyone know of any existing code written to perform this task that I
could user for inspiration?

Thank you!