>I understand table buffering well enough but it breaks down quickly when using parent-child-grandchild-etc tables with forms. Then you are faced with having to save the record somehow to revert it without actually calling tablerevert. What is a good strategy to do this?
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>1. Scatter to memory... object... array?
>2. Copy the record to a temp table?
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>Then should I bind the actual fields to the controls and copy the data back to the table if I need to revert or should I bind to whatever I scatter to and copy the scatter vars back to the table in the need to save?

You should use buffering in any case; you can use local views (parameterized) for the child table, for performance reasons.

You should think about the user interface; in the Visual Extend framework, one way this is managed is having separate forms for parent and child. In this case, the user can't even start working on the child record before saving the parent record.