I just discovered Zope a couple of weeks ago, and have started migrating a cgi based web application that I was writing in straight python to Zope both as a learning exercise and to take advantage of Zope's feature set. My problem is, I have several sql tables that I'm storing data in that I need to be able to have the same jobid in because I'm using the jobid to match which comments are attached to which jobs. When I was using cgis, this was easy - I made a class that wrapped the following function def makeID(self): idstring = "%s-%s.%s-%s" % (self.prefix, os.getpid(), time.time(), self.counter) self.counter = self.counter + 1 return idstring and I could be guaranteed their uniqueness because prefix was the hostname of the server the cgi was running on, and the combination of the other 3 parts was unique per call to makeID. Now that I'm using Zope, the pid isn't unique any more, of course. I don't want to store a counter in the database, because from some of the postings I saw in the last few days here I think it'll cause my db to grow for no reason as it stores unwanted undo information. I also haven't figured out how to lock an object while I update properties yet. I don't want to use an external file either, because the constant locking & unlocking seems likely to cause performance problems eventually. I have both _The Zope Book_ and _Zope Web Application Development and Content Management_ , and haven't found an answer to my problem in either book as yet. I'm running Zope 2.5.0b3 with Python 2.1.1 on Mac OS X 10.1.2 Thanks, jpb -- Joe Block <jpb@ApesSeekingKnowledge.net> Madness takes its toll. Please have exact change ready.