Ian,

What I usually do is have a stand-alone 'system' table with one single record.

In there I keep some system wide information (like the data path) and then
load these system-wide parameters in public variables at startup.

This way you can store your path or other system-wide parameters outside
your code.

This has helped me in some applications where users had to install
the application locally but with the data in some remote data storage
localtion. Since each user had the possibility to mount the data storage
location on different network drives or even through RAS I
created a secondary application that let them change the path value
in the table.

HTH

Pascal