>OK folks, August FoxPro Advisor just hit my desk. Page 58, "Empower Your Users to Adapt Business Rules" by Charles Blankenship - and I *ReallyReallyReally* like this approach of table-based validation of Business Rules for an app, that can be maintained over application life via UI!!! I think it's an excellent approach to developing a robust app that's rule intensive. AND it gets me around the dbc's clunky field rule message dialog.
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>But there's one thing I don't get with this approach. Blankenship talks about "Enterprise-wide data validation" on page 65. But I don't see how having my business rules in a table is going to do me any good if my users want to ODBC access to my app's data? IOW How would you trigger validation via ODBC with this approach?

IF the rule is triggered in the field or record validation, then this rule holds even through ODBC. An update will fail through ODBC if the VR fails.

As an aside, you might want to rethink your plan of using VFP tables through ODBC. It works, but it is not optimal. VFP is not really designed as a database server. I have very little experience here, am only repeating what I've read...