Erik,
This may be really a dumb suggestion but did you include the quotes in the string? IOW, this gives me the same error you get:

dbsetprop('temp','view', 'ruletext', 'Goobers!' )

But with the inner quotes...

dbsetprop('temp','view', 'ruletext', '"Goobers!"' )

...all is well.

HTH.

>
>Thanks, Nancy. I looked at the article, and it s indeed documenting the behavior I found, but it doesn't do much to tell me what I have done wrong. The article basically says that this error stems from illegal values being entered in the Ruletext, RuleExpression, or DefaultValue properties. This makes sense, but what I don't understand is how a regular string can be an illegal value for the RuleText property.
>
>So I still don't know how to get around it. I am in the middle of (almost finished actually) building a view editor to replace the one that comes with VFP. This error came up while testing, but I then found that the native View Designer causes this error too. hmmm.