>Thanks a lot Victor. I use free tables and believe SBT builds on the DBC, but I'll take a look at it. Doug Hennig is one of the VFP developers I most respect.
>
>Can you tell me something about what you did that was similar to what I am trying to do?

I've actually done a great amount of things - but one of the neat things was how to deal with lookup tables and the screens/grids that use them. I wanted screens that the users could use to maintain the lookup tables, so using the metadata I was able to indicate which tables were lookup tables, and which fields in that table were editable by users - then I wrote ONE screen that dynamically added the controls to the screen based on the metadata. It works quite well and even knows if to create a spinner, textbox, combobox, etc. I actually ran into Doug at a convention years ago & showed him what I'd one and he was pretty impressed - of course it was more than 10 years ago so I doubt he'd remember now..:)


>>You might want to take a look at the Stonefield Database Toolkit - ...it deals with metadata and adds extended features to the database properties for database objects. If I understand what it is you're trying to do, I've done something similar with SDT. (And SDT is one of my all time favorite VFP goodies)
>>
>>http://www.stonefield.com/sdt.aspx
>>
>>>I want to define a group of normalized tables so that it is straightforward to define new types of detail fields in a data dictionary to accomodate customer requests.
>>>
>>>At runtime I will use a crosstab cursor to group detail fields into logical (virtual) records. These virtual records will be used for data entry, in grids, in reports etc. The records will contain all columns defined in the data dictionary.
>>>
>>>I am tempted to split the virtual records in two. The first part would be a physical table with the fields common to all users of the application, and the second part would be a cross table with the extra fields defined in the data dictionary. The physical table and the virtual table would have a one to one relationship. The motivation is that is seems like a big waste of resources to always have to create a cross tab table that includes "permament" fields.
>>>
>>>I'd welcome your comments and recommendations.
>>>
>>>TIA,
>>>
>>>Alex