>>I never needed datetime, so I never really "investigated" this type. I am very surprised how bad it's implemented. There is no FoxPro function to extract time from a datetime. (Or I didn't find it?)
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>TIME() does this (but the seconds settings I've tried don't seem to work on it).

NO, TIME() returns the current system time in hh:mm:ss format. If you specify a numeric parameter, it returns also the hundredths of seconds. So, if the parameter is a datetime format (which is in fact a number in the database (8 bytes)) it will return the system time in hh:mm:ss.cc format.

>I attempted this with numeric, but it didn't work out too well, the data entry was awkward. I'll give the char idea a try...I don't realy care about the date, as you note below I can always deal with that, it's just the HH:MM input that I really need. The one problem with the IAC is that also time has total H/M restrictions too, like 12 and 60. I guess I can check these too with VAL()...

Yes, you must check each char. Do it with InteractiveChange method. It's fired for each change (e.g. user enters 4 digits, it will be fired 4 times). Of course, you must also check in Valid method. It's a little work here, but your doing it only once for a clss and you'll use it everywhere... isn't OOP great?

>Yes, that sounds good. I thought this project was going to be pretty easy. Famous last words...Thanks for the input.

I just checked datetime type in VFP 5.0. Nothing new from 3.0. It's amazing how many features are missing.

Vlad