Thanks for the reply Bruce. This is basically the type of approach I ended up settling on. A word of caution though, I'm using COUNT instead because RECCOUNT ignores the status of SET DELETED.

Re alphabet soup: A friend of mine applied this one to me and my wife DINKS (Dual Income No KidS) Worth a chuckle :-)

>PMFJI and FWIW (love alphabet soup *s*) Colin. I use the when of the grid to do a reccount on the child records. If it is zero, I automatically INSERT a new record (row). You could also ask the user if that's what is wanted before doing it. Works very snooth for me. HTH
>
>
>>PMFJI Erik, I just started experimenting with .AllowAddNew=.T. in my grids. The problem is this functionality only works when there is at least 1 record displayed in the grid so my grids run into problems when entering for the first time or after deleteing all child records. Is there a smooth way to get around this?
>>
>>>>I get a problem when I append a new record in the grid, the new record pointer will be point to the first grid row, how can i set the pointer in the last grid row.
>>>
>>>The record pointer is refreshed when the grid receives focus. From your add button, you can
>>>
>>>APPEND BLANK
>>>THISFORM.mygrid1.Refresh()
>>>THISFORM.mygrid1.SetFocus()
>>>
>>>and it will update the pointer.
>>>
>>>>And I also want to know how the new record pointer will be jump to the last grid row for me to continue add a new record when it is in the ADDING RECORD MODE (it mean that i only need to press ADD button once I can add more than one records).
>>>
>>>You can check out the grid.AllowAddNew property.