>Thanks for the info. These are all great ideas. I am curious about the last idea to place an input mask on the database field... What if I have a mask on the table field like "99:99", and then I try to save "12:00" to it (with the colon)?

REPLACE MyField WITH "12:00"

saves "12:00" into MyField when Myield's input mask is set to "99:99"

the problem comes when you:

REPLACE MyField WITH "1200"

then you get "12:0"

in the field.

But the cool thing about setting properties in the dbc like this, is that VFP allows you to specifiy that these propreties should come over to the textbox when you drag a field from the DE tothe form.

Or, if you use a textbox class (which you should be doing) , you could put code like this in it's init event:

IF !EMPTY(THIS.ControlSource)
    lcINputMask = DBGETPROP(THIS.ControlSource, "field", "inputmask")
    IF !EMPTY(THIS.InputMask) AND !EMPTY(lcInputMask)
        THIS.InputMask = lcInputMask
    ENDIF
ENDIF

and your input mask will always trickle down from the dbc to the control that is bound to that field.