Hi Marcia,

>As a generally rule, I use Composition ( AddObject ) rather than Aggregation ( NewObject or CreateObject ) whenever possible because the container object "owns" all of the contained items. When the container is destroyed, all of its contained objects are destroyed too. So the chances of a dangling reference are greatly reduced.

The only reason this matters is because of VFP's buggy garbage collector <s>. AFAIK child object references are still released before the Destroy() of the parent object fires so the difference between a container and an actual object reference doesn't make that much of a difference. Certainly it's easy to have a dangling reference that won't clean up either way...

The key issue for this often is order of how objects are released and the only real safe way is to explicitly release the objects. In Web COnnection 5.0 for example I've had major issues with this very issue and I experimented around with different classes, containership etc. before just using Custom classes and properties, but firing an explicit Dispose() method whenever objects release with that method implementing the required release sequence. It works, but of course requires that control developers pay close attention to implementing a Dispose() method properly.

+++ Rick ---