>>>The problem for me is that I need to be able to take action if THIS objet is the last child belonging to its immediate parent. The ambiguity mentioned in (2) above makes that impossible. Because of (1) above, I cannot even implement a manually coded alternative.
>>>I could take some action in the parent, when it's last child is removed, but there is no event that always fires at the parent when one of its children is removed. RemoveObject doesn't fire in the second case in (2) above.
>>>
>>Hi, Mark
>> If you are using VFP6 you might want to try Access/Assign on the parent object's ControlCount property.
>> I am also curious(I read Eric Moore's message) as to what you are trying to do.
>> Let me know how it works.
>>
>>Ned
>
>Hello Edwin and Erik,
>
>Edwin, the Assign idea looked promising, but...
>
>Quote from the manual
>"You can create an Assign method for a native Visual FoxPro property that is read-only (for example, the ParentClass property), but the method will never be executed."
>
>What am I trying to do? I'm re-writing my Menu classes (see files section) to correct a bug introduced by this new (to VFP 6) Destroy behaviour.
>
>If the user decides to remove an item from the menu e.g.
>_SCREEN.Menu.Tools.RemoveObject("Options")
>
>a number of flags/counters must be adjusted and these in turn will mean changes to the 'real world' state of the displayed menu.
>
>As the object structure models the physical menu structure it is tricky to operate the PAD/POPUP/BAR mechanism without quite a lot of parent/child communication.
>
>Any suggestions?

How about giving the user a RemovePad() method to use, instead of RemoveObject. This way, you have control over what happens.