It behaves this way because VFP expects you to put all the tables you'll use in a report in the report's DE. I don't know why it expects you to do that, but it does.

I sometimes create tables instead of cursors then add the tables to the DE. When I'm done with the report format I delete the tables, remove them from the DE, and change the code back to creating cursors. Maybe there's a less kludgy way, but that's the best I've found.

>I am learning VFP and am still doing a lot of things the old FPW2.6 ways. I am used to creating a wrapper program for my reports which creates cursor tables which my report then uses. I would typically write the wrapper program and place a MODI REPORT where the REPORT FORM statement would go and then interactively build the report using all of the data setup by my program.
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>I tried doing this in VFP and when I go to add fields the only fields available are those of tables in the reports dataenvironment. It seems to behave as though my carefully built cursors do not exist.
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>Why does it behave this way? Is there a better way to process reports?