>>A problem has come up with an earlier project designed by someone else but poses a question in general. We have lots of setup tables in our hotel package that are used for select lists and now, in visual, combo boxes and dropdown lists. Some of the reports were designed to match exact values, say for example a travel agent's name. A client recently made changes to the agent list, for example, changing 'myname co.' to 'myname co.,ltd'. They didn't tell me some names were edited so I spent a bit of time searching thier tables to try to understand why the report was coming up empty for that agent. Every record contained the old spelling and the query is based on the new spelling. So, is thier a common policy that is used in the Fox world to prevent this? We've considered updating all the .dbfs related to any list if a field in the setup table is edited, but that could get messy. Allowing only addmode to the setup tables would create an even bigger mess. Hmmm...
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>>Eric K.
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>You should link the data ONLY via an Id number assigned to each record. Then the descriptions can be changed leaving the links intact.
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>Combos in VFP can be set to display a description field, but store the corresponding Id field.

Yes, I think the previous designer should not have used a text field in this situation. We are designing now to provide an SQL Select builder which allows the user to make selections based on tables that may have 100+ fields. They can base their query on any field, any date range, billnum range, etc, etc. Then the form builds the SQL select statement from their selections and sends it to a browse or to file or print. This means that we have to add id numbers to the existing tables anywhere a user might be able to alter some value. Unfortunately, in this environment, you tend to go combo ding dong because people here don't type english very well, and if you don't provide a dropdown list, they tend to just skip over it. This also means miles of extra code to make sure every field is validated in every form all the time. For example, when an employee makes a personal call, they need to enter some reason in the phonebill portion when the call comes in from PABX. Well, it was decided that we needed a dropdown list of reasons for personal calls. ;)

Eric K.