Our new back office system (cost £ms) refuses to talk to our transaction processing system. It's nothing new, we are a bank of course.
The new system will take text files, posted to a folder on a shared drive. No more than 100 transactions can be listed in the text file. (There are astronomical numbers of transactions a day).
The file name is limited to 4 characters alpha characters for example DCBA. The next file in sequence would be DCBB etc. Apart from giving over 450,000 possible combinations of file name, is there any other reason why such a silly sequence is demanded. 0001, 0002 would be so much easier to automate via our batch processing system? Or, is it to keep programmers employed?
(BTW, file numbers can be re-used, thank goodness or we would run out after a few days.)
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