I know you have gone the route of inserting an empty record to "fix" the id/order number, but you are apparently making an electronic version of a paper order form, where each form has a pre-printed number on it.

The short answer - you don't need to display the order number until the order has been placed. There is no real world need to be displaying the number on the entry form (look at the extra code to do this and the problems it creates - like if they don't complete the order, you now have an incomplete row in the database that should be removed at some point, meaning even more code to write and manage.)