The background is that I'm trying to prototype a drupal 7 site for some friends, that will (eventually) be used for their small business - they sell stuff they make.
What I need is for each different item they sell, to be assigned a unique reference number. A stock number, if you like.
The plan was to create a content type for their products, with the usual sort of entries: description, photo, etc. One of the fields was to be the reference number. Now, obviously this has to be unique - so it's just too error prone to have them manually insert a number in a field. What I was hoping for was that there would be a field type along the lines of "autoincrement integer", but there isn't. Plan B was to install a module that would add this functionality - the Serial Field module looked promising, but it doesn't work with Drupal 7.
Now, unless I'm positively barking up the wrong tree, this must be the sort of design issue that every Drupal developer who's ever created a commercial site must face. So I was kinda hoping there was a standard way of doing it. Searching through drupal.org doesn't show up anything obvious, so my question is: How do people create unique numeric fields in Drupal 7?