Hi all,
I have two tables: EBILLHD.DBF and EBILLDT.DBF; which has a parent-child relationship. They are related as such: EBILLHD.ETAG 1-to-many EBILLHD.ETRANTAG. There are 6569 rows in EBILLHD with a max value of ETAG = 26858. There are 35602 rows in EBILLDT. There is at least one EBILLDT row for each EBILLHD record. We are deploying the applications using VFP8 runtimes.

This is my problem and I don't know what caused it. For a series of EBILLHD.ETAGs, the relation does not work, meaning - zero record browsed, in this code:

SELE 0
USE EBILLHD
INDEX ON BINTOC(ETAG) TO TEMP
SELE 0
USE EBILLDT
SET RELATION TO BINTOC(ETRANTAG) INTO EBILLHD
BROWSE FOR EBILLHD.ETAG = 26815 && WORKS
BROWSE FOR EBILLHD.ETAG = 26816 && DOES NOT WORK
BROWSE FOR EBILLHD.ETAG = 26817 && DOES NOT WORK
BROWSE FOR EBILLHD.ETAG = 26818 && DOES NOT WORK
BROWSE FOR EBILLHD.ETAG = 26819 && DOES NOT WORK
BROWSE FOR EBILLHD.ETAG = 26820 && WORKS

These are some things that I did to try to resolve the problem:
1. Copy the contents of both file to temporary files and zapped the original files and reindexed the zapped files then appended back the data. Did not work.
2. Use STR() instead of BINTOC() and it WORKS.
3. Used BINTOC(ETAG,4) with second parameter. Did not work.
4. Copied the two files using COPY TO ... CDX to temporary files. Dropped tables from DBC. Copied back from temp files using COPY TO ... CDX. Added newly created files to DBC. This works.

I would have thought item#1 would work. Why did it not work? Using item#2 works but requires new EXE and is the last option. I will create a script that I can use to fix the problem using item#4.

Still, I am afraid that the same problem will occur. Does anyone have the same problem or at least now why VFP behaves this way or what causes this problem. Thoughts/comments/feedbacks/etc are always welcome.