<s> One of the things I've come to love in VFE is having remote views with dynamic params on the foxpro side. I can have 12 params on a view in VFP, give them all to the user and only include the ones the user chooses to set as part of the SQL statement that goes to the backend. And of course since I also have metadata and classes with hooks on those params I can massage how each is used before it even becomes part of the statement created by the parser. This is very different even than what SQL considers 'dynamic views' on the back end.

Strataframe uses business objects which persist dataretrieval SELECT statements, of course, so that is theoretically possible there as well, but there is a ways to go before it has anything near this capability. But the first step is an awareness that it *can* be done and that it *should* be done.

Most VFP developers don't actually seem to expect the kind of power and flexibility VFP is capable of. I think a lot of folks don't even know what a sophisticated framework does ( I know I certainly wouldn't have if I hadn't had the good sense to seek out people who knew how to build one )


>>Anyway, I am very used to having a metadata store and data-driving a lot of stuff in VFP and have been looking for places in .Net where that would be appropriate.
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>You mean, possible? ;)
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>>I realize this is kind of an amorphous question, but any thoughts you have ( or references to things you or others may have written on the subject ) about metadata in .Net would be most welcome.
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>Can you imagine what a deja vu am I having in this thread? I had the same one back in 1991 with a prominent Clipper guru back home, where I specifically asked whether it is possible in clipper to call a function whose name was retrieved from a table. The guy wiggled for about a week and eventually fired The Question (qv elsewhere in my posts for this weekend ;): "why would you need that at all?".
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>Of course, I didn't tell him why until he confessed that nope, that can't really be done in Clipper (I'm still confused on that, as IIRC Clipper had & but don't remember what its limitations were, and my knowledge doesn't go beyond '87 edition). At that time, I was replacing the generated menus with data driven dynamic menus. And then we got 2.0 with name expressions, textmerge etc... the whole story just got more interesting. A whole world completely beyond reach of static languages.
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>So, no matter how hard the Gang of Four may try to make their patterns language independent, they are succeeded as much as Fox is OS independent. Specially the factory pattern, which is implemented in 50 lines in Fox (from Define Class to EndDefine) with just about six fields in a factory.dbf, whereas the chapter in the GoF's book is much longer than that, because they think in C, or any other static language.