Hi John,
Knowing your skill level (which far exceeds mine) my response was a query, not a criticism. The "guide" seems to be less than accurate in many cases. I though you may have known of an errata or loophole! :-)
Jerry

>Hi Jerry ---
>
>I meant avoid explicitly opening and updating the base table. I know that the table will be opened automatically. Sorry for the confusion ;-)
>
>>
>>How can you avoid not having the base table open when you open a local view. Page 193 of the M$ Programmer's Guide says that opening a view will also cause the base table to be opened automatically. That is my experience, also.
>>
>>I used the FLUSH command after the successful TABLEUPDATE command to make sure the modified record was moved out of the buffer into the table. It seemed to take awhile for the indexing to reflect the change anyway, but not as much time as not using FLUSH.