>By golly, yes, you did. I guess that because I thought, at the time, that I didn't need to worry about it, I wasn't paying enough attention. In fact, last night when I read Thomas' message, again, I didn't pay much attention. It was only this morning when I discovered that using functions or adding temporary fields to the select would wipe out the deleted flag that I knew I had a bigger problem than I thought, and I guess Thomas' message was fresher in my memory.
>
>Had I known then what I know now, this thread would have been a whole lot shorter after your initial message. Anyway, that appears to be the answer. I've changed my code in a number of places now, and it works beautifully.
>
>In fact, even if I run into a situation of joining 2 tables, then I can use the same process but it will just require one or two more steps and intermediate cursors. I tried it out in test this morning and it is still fast, even with more steps.
>
>Ya really gotta love this UT place.
>
>Thanks for everything Naomi.

We're all learning here...

But remember Mike's and mine caution. You can use deleted() only if you're selecting from one table. Add one more table and you're out of luck.

And of course this would not work if you decide to convert to a different backend. Keep all this in mind.