# Assign dynamic (incrementable) values to objects **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [May 5, 2009, 11:50pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/assign-dynamic-incrementable-values-to-objects/167251 "2009-05-05T23:50:53Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![mike](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/58f4c7/32.png) [@mike](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/mike)\ **Post date:** [May 5, 2009, 11:50pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/assign-dynamic-incrementable-values-to-objects/167251/1 "2009-05-05T23:50:53Z")
I am working on a registration form for users. Users can sign up to attend some sport events and are automatically assigned a starting number depending on the users type. There are several types of users and all have a specific range of starting numbers. 0001 - 0050: not automatically assigend 0051 - 0600: type 1 0601 - 0650: type 2 1000 - 1300: type 3 … What would be the best practice, to assign these values to a user and increment the right counter? Storing these values in a database table might be a little tricky. I also could save the configuration in a yaml file, load it from there and write it back. But what about multiple reads and writes at the same time. Can this be handled by a message queue, which ensures that the file (or database table) is sequentially accessed? Thanks for any comment!