Hiya Todd ----

Hope I can help with a few of these issues 'cause, boy, do they sound familiar :-)

>
>Ok... Problems with this methodology: 1. Unless all the character fields are changed into type MEMO they are inserted into the second database with trailing spaces. Not horrible, except the commerical package was written with ANSI set on, and it won't see any of my records if there are trailing spaces in the SYSTEM_NAME key field. Also I have worries that the commerical program's search routines won't work correctly if there are trailing spaces in say, LAST_NAME.

Try changing the views data type to Character(Binary)...or, maybe, PADR() the ALLTRIMmed value with CHR(0). Or, import *all* character fields from the commerical program and save them back as padded with blanks for consistancy.

>2. Date fields are giving me serious fits. About half the time, it tells me that it can't convert date/time values (ODBC error) and the other half the time, VFP just crashes outright (invalid page fault). Arrrgh. I think that it has something to do with .NULL. values, but I am not sure.
>

Yup. ODBC (I think) cannot handle blank dates well and you're at the mercy of the database engine and/or VFP as to how they are defined. Try converting the views date fields to DateTime and set them to allow nulls. When saving a record with a blank date (which Fox allows), save a .NULL. instead.