Give your discussion with John, and Bruce's question: have you put a breakpoint before the replace line that errors out? It *should* be (famous last words!) a simple matter to determine whether "val4" is in scope or not.

>I have a grid based on a p-view. For simplicity let's say that the grid has 3 columns and that the view has some 30 columns. If I append a record to the view I can only replace fields that are also contained in the grid, otherwise I get an "Unonwn variable xxx" ie
>
>*The following code works:
> select view
> append blank
> replace fld1 with val1,;
> fld2 with val2,;
> fld3 with val3
>* so far so good but if I add a line like:
> replace fld4 with val4
>*I get an error message like "Unknown variable val4 in..."
..snip