TOPIC:

Hi,
If I use [year][month]# what will the effect be of the option "Separate counter per format value". Reset the counter at 1 at the beginning of the new month or by the beginning of the new year?
I hope by the beginning of a new year!

It's actually a bit more complicated: The plugin does not have one counter, that is reset at the beginning of a new year/month.
Rather is has multiple concurrent counters. When generating the order number, the plugin will first replace all [...] parts with the variable values. Then it will look if for the resulting string a counter already exists, increase the value by 1 and insert that counter value instead of the #.

Let's look at an example in your case:
-) First order (On March 3):
"[year][month]#" will first be replaced to "201403#". Then the plugin will look into the database whether a counter named "201403#" already exists. It does not yet, so the plugin will use a counter value of 1 and insert that (and will store the value of the "201403#" counter into the database). Thus the result will be "2014031".

-) Another order (on march 25):
"[year][month]#" will first be replaced to "201403#". This time, a counter named "201403#" already exists (with value 1), so the new value will be 2 and is inserted into the format to yield "2014032"

-) Another order (on april 1):
"[year][month#" will now be replaced to "201404#". There is not yet such a counter, so a value of 1 will be used, which leads to "2014041".


So, in effect it appears as if the counter is reset at the beginning of each month in your case, while in fact a new counter is used for each month. In your case that might not seem to make a difference.

However, this approach has the advantage that you can have e.g. different counters for orders to different countries. If you use the format "[year]-[countrycode2]-#", each country will have its own counter and you have order numbers like "2014-AT-1", "2014-DE-1", "2014-AT-2", "2014-AT-3", "2014-CH-1", "2014-DE-2", etc. (Notice that the orders for AT have one counter, while the DE have another independent countet).


This approach is very generic (and very simple, yet really powerful), but unfortunately it also means that having a format of "[year][month]#" where the counter is reset only each year is NOT possible, since the format value will change each month and the format value will be used as the counter name...

Best regards,
Reinhold

Problem solved.