Hi Henry ---

>When I then attempt to access the member variable record_field_name for the name of the record field in say a SCATTER command (i.e. SCATTER THIS.record_field_name ... TO laFieldInfo) I get an error like the following "RECORD_FIELD_NAME is not a file variable".

Try the following:

cRecord_Field_Name = THIS.record_field_name
SCATTER (cRecord_field_name) TO laFieldInfo.

The problem is that SCATTER (and lots of other commands) expect a literal, not a string as the fieldname. It is trying to interpret THIS.whatever as table THIS, field whatever. So you have to move this into a variable (to get rid of the ".") and then put the parenthesis around it to have the variable evaluated and not taken literally.