Doing what I wanted to do took six hours and 120 lines of code, all in all, but I learnt a good deal on the way. ;-)
At times, manual intervention can be a lifesaver.
You have already said that you have to 'ring fence' bank holidays, and weekends, so someone has to check or enter the bank holidays.
So I would provide two 'fill' functions that populates an issue number table, and will either fill the week if no bank holidays, or fill each selected day when there is a bank holiday in the week.
This can then be done monthly or yearly as the look ahead time requires.
Or am I missing something - I've only ever used Interbase/Firebird, and never had a problem with this sort of ident.
--
Lester Caine
-----------------------------
L.S.Caine Electronic Services