hmmm....I agree, something is up. I even tried it with table2 having no records, using iif() instead of nvl():

select aid, aagcy, iif(isnull(bvalue),'a',bvalue) as bvalue ;
    from table1 ;
    left join table2 on (table2.bidv = table1.aid) into cursor tempo readwrite

bvalue was the right length in the resulting recordset. VFP's pretty smart I guess. :)



>Steve,
>That is not true. First record being null or not doesn't affect the resulting size. It's known by VFP using the fieldsize of bvalue.
>Cetin
>