>James,
>
>Use groups as in;
>
>PageHeader - Heading
>
>Group 1 - ItemA (table 1)
>Group 2 - ItemA1Detail (Table 2)
>Group 3 - ItemA1ADetail (table 3)
>Detail - ItemA1ADetail (Table 4)
>
>The limit of groups is 20 deep so you should have not problem in doing what you want.

Hi Jim,

Just an update.

Following your advice, I created a group for each table, leaving the detail band for the lowest table in the hierarchy.

Worked like a charm except I could not make it go with the native tables.

Even working with data session, relations, set skip on etc, would not cause the table data to display in the correct sequence -- a mystery I intend to unravel one of these days, but no time now.

By selecting the data into a cursor, however, the report worked correctly.

Thanks again for the tip.

regards,