I need to take the autoincrement value and add it to the first two letters of the last name, frist two letters of the last name, to create an 8 character barcode value. Here is my Trigger; BEFORE INSERT ON patron FOR EACH ROW begin set @namestring = left(new.namel,2); set @namestring2 = left(new.namef,2); set @namestring3= last_insert_id(); set new.barcode = concat(@namestring,@namestring2,@namestring3); end Problem: @namestring3 always returns 0. What is the proper way to do this? Using mySQL 5.0 with third party app generating insert. Connector is 3.51.12