Okay this is just to prove that I can submit a sensible posting on this site. . .This is more of a heads-up than anything but i'd welcome experience from elsewhere... . .Here at a well-known establishment for maintaining the Nations Health i've built a recruitment interface that extracts vacancies and imports applicants to these vacancies. The data being exchanged with a 3rd part web-based recruitment system. . .Part of the inboud process requires that it correctly identifies whether the new applicant is already in the system either as an existing applicant existing employee ex-applicant ex-employee etc. This is done as it determines which of the multitude of applicant API's I can use. It should be noted here that both Employee and Applicant numbers are auto generated. . .Here's the situation. .I have an Applicant. Call him Bob (hello Bob). .Bob is hired into a job and thus becomes an employee. .Viewed in the Enter & Maintain screen you can see that Bobs person type is now Employee.Ex-Applicant. . .All fine and Dandy. . .A little while later Bob decides to apply for another job through this recruitment web site. . .The application is passed through to Oracle where it encounters my wonder interface. Since Bob is already an Employee we have to use the following API... .HR_EMPLOYEE_API.APPLY_FOR_INTERNAL_VACANCY. . .The problem is this API call fails with the following error... .ORA-20001: The applicant number is system generated and cannot be modified. . .Now we're not supplying the applicant number cos its system generated. However on investigation of the api code we find that because Bob used to be an applicant the column APPLICANT_NUMBER is already populated (on PER_ALL_PEOPLE_F) with his original applicant number. The API is seeing this and throwing the error because it thinks we've supplied it as part of the call!! . .I've raised a TAR (4199293.994) - back in January but good old support are doing the usual heel-dragging. .I've a work around that invloves zapping out the applicant number on the latest row of the person just prior to calling the API. . .Hey ho

No comfort to you at all I'm sure but I remember seeing this at a well-known authority of financial services located in the City a number of years ago now. Existing emp applies for job api falls over because of internal auto-numbering violation. Hmm. . .Good to see you still have your hacking head on...