Gar,

>The one method we came up with no rigging is unfortunately not supported by VFP. I think any method will have some kind of compromise. But your are right that there may be a less kludgy workaround out there. If you come up with one I will be very interested, because I am in the midst of developing an app with lots of grandchild, and even some great-grandchild relations.
>

There is something else I pursued briefly that has some promise. It involves some rigging, but all hacking is in the front end, and there are no normalization violations.

Consider our Sales Order:Line Items:Sales History example. When the user selects a sales order, you load all records from Line Items and Sales History into local tables. Using filters or whatever, you only display the relevant records to the user. When the user saves, you push the whole shebang to the back end.

Obviously, it can run into problems, as the number of records being retrieved grows exponentially with the number of levels in the heirarchy. A customer:...:Line Item History might be a significant load. This must be solved or the solution is not practical.

One approach I took with this using updateable views failed, but I think I took the wrong approach. I haven't done much with it since I made my original posting.