Robert,

This is very tricky with VFP. You can encrypt your data with a third party tool like Cryptor or Netlib (both available from www.hallogram.com). This won't stop people from opening the tables with a text editor or other application and intentionally or accidently damaging them, but it does stop them from reading or writing data. Cetin's suggestion of using triggers can prevent unauthorized writing to your tables, but won't stop people from reading them. Nigel's suggestion will only work in single-user systems and won't protect you from editing tools.

If you need very high security you'll need to move to a client/server solution using something like SQL Server or SQL Anywhere as your back end. If you just need to prevent the casual user from messing things up one of the ideas already suggested should work.

>How do I prevent someone from accessing a .dbf outside of my application? DBF's reside on a Novell server. Anyone with access to the application has access to the .dbf's and could view and alter the .dbf's without going through the application.
>
>Is there a property or something that could be set on the .dbf's that would require a password or something like that?
>
>Thanks,