Limiting The Number Of Available Records In A Table, And Recycling/reusing Them...?

Well boys and girls, its about that time in the week where I have once again come up with a brilliant application for my little Access project, but have no idea how to make it happen.

I will start with a little background info... In the course of the parts recoveries we have different reasons for recovering parts, different people (locations) that request them, and different priorities for recoveries. For example, when a new model comes out, we will recover 100% of the parts for investigation by the factory... however, we may want to take a look at failed water pumps first. In this case, our recovery, until it is complete, will have higher priority than the 100%, otherwise we would not receive any parts.

This is because of the way our warranty system works... It assignes a three digit number to each part number of a recovery (between 1-999). The lower the number, the higher the priority.

So if I am setting up a 100% recovery, I would want to put it in the, say, 200's. This would leave room for an overlapping recovery to be inserted in the 100's where it would divert a certain number of parts away from the normal recovery stream. Then, once a user-defined date or quantity of parts has been reached, the corresponding number goes dead, and any of those part numbers are reunited with the original recovery stream.

Sticking to the example above, typically 100% recoveries would go for say... 2-3 years, where as an in-house recovery might be for 20 parts... Another difference is that the longer term recoveries are managed by the end date, where shorter term recoveries are by number of parts recieved.

What I want to do is be able to auto assign these numbers based on criteria derived from user-inputted data... (i.e. destination, start/end date, recovery type, etc.). Then, when the recovery is complete, whether based on date or quantity recieved, to delete the information associated with the 3 digit number, block its use for 45 days, and then be able to reuse the number for a new recovery.

Whew.

Thanks to anyone who can be bothered to read past the first paragraph, let alone offer any advice.