Hi,

We are in the process of migrating a solely VFP based application to a .NET Winforms/SQL solution.

The application requires that users be able to define some of their own data tables where the available field types come from a limited pre-defined list. Actually, for the new version we might use the same type for all fields (basically they will contain serialized objects). As a general rule a user will define a maximum of five or six tables and each table will contain no more than six/seven columns and a few hundred records.

In the VFP version we physically created these individual tables and the approach worked OK - but it wasn't pretty.

For the SQL version I am considering simulating the seperate tables by using three tables - e.g something like:
TableList: Id, TableName
ColumnList: Id, ColumnName, TableId, ColumnType
RowList: Id, Rowid,ColumnListId, Data

Does anyone have any views of the pros and cons of such an approach? The first hurdle that I see is constructing a constraint that ensures that RowList rows with the same RowId only use a ColumnListId for Columns from the same Table.....

TIA,
Viv