The auto-increment option will generate an incremental progression of values in any of the available data types. The first value will be the logical "zero" element - which is 0 for numeric types, false for Boolean, and 1970-01-01 for Dates (the beginning of the Unix Epoch). When a limit of the data type is reached (e.g. for byte, at 127) the value will be reset to the minimum supported value (so for byte, -128) and the sequence will proceed.

If the range option is chosen, you should enter the first and last allowed values. These values may include ${substitution} strings. For example, for an Integer between 5 and 10, enter First=5 and Last=10. Range has special behaviour for Strings, Doubles and Floats.

String: The first and last strings are padded with spaces as necessary to make them the same length. Then, for each character, a random value is chosen between (inclusive) the corresponding character position from each string, so H and W might give P, for example, but never A or Z. Here is an example:

	String Range S1000000A to S2999999Z 
	

This allows realistic looking Singapore ICs to be generated. The first letter will always be S (S->S), the second letter will be either 1 or 2 (1->2) subsequent digits might be anything (0->9), finishing with an uppercase character (A-Z) (representing the checksum, which of course is random, so it will not usually be correct). Similarly,

	String Range Mr Aaaaaaa to Mr Zzzzzz 
	

allows random names. Of course you could separate Title as a set of Values (see later) Dr,Mr,Ms etc. for even more flexibility.

Doubles and Floats: To generate a random floating point number between 1 and 10, you can enter First=1 and Last=10, as you would expect. You will get a random number with the full precision of the data type, e.g. 5.183456738923. If you want a number that represents an amount, you might want something like 5.18 instead. To obtain this, specify the number of decimal spaces in the First and Last strings: First=1.00 Last=10.00 will give you floating point numbers, but only to two decimal places. This option only works for up to four decimal places. Thus if you want a full precision decimal in the range 0.5 to 1.5, you should specify First=0.50000 Last=1.50000 (the five decimal places exceeds the limit of four, so full precision will be used. If you use 0.5 to 1.5, you will only get one decimal place of precision, as described earlier.

The alternative to a range is to specify allowed values, that are comma separated. For example:

Normal, Warning, Critical

Each option here will have a one-third chance of being selected for each record. If you want more Normals, then just add more to the list:

Normal, Normal, Normal, Warning, Critical

Now Normal will occur with higher frequency than Warning or Critical. If you need a comma to appear in one of your values, you should escape it with a backslash. For example "Hello\, World, Goodbye" has two values, the first being "Hello, World". Once again, you can use ${substitution} strings in the values.