>I've been trying to get this to work with ODBC and SPT but if i read the VFP docs correctly a param can't be part of a SELECT statement. Anyway. so far no luck but I'm not sure it is critical to the app and seems like kind of a half assed approach to do in on the back end when it is a VFP app and the potential result set is really small anyway.

You can do this one of two ways:

LOCAL lnRows

lnRows = 10
SET STEP ON 
TEXT TO lcSQL NOSHOW TEXTMERGE
   DECLARE @RowsToGet INT
   SET @RowsToGet = <<m.lnRows>>
   SELECT TOP (@RowsToGet) * FROM SomeTable ORDER BY SomeField
ENDTEXT 

?SQLEXEC(m.lnHandle, m.lcSQL, "curResults1")


LOCAL lnRows

lnRows = 10

TEXT TO lcSQL NOSHOW 
   DECLARE @RowsToGet INT
   SET @RowsToGet = ?m.lnRows
   SELECT TOP (@RowsToGet) * FROM SomeTable ORDER BY SomeField
ENDTEXT 

?SQLEXEC(m.lnHandle, m.lcSQL, "curResults2")