A common problem with views is that the View Designer can't handle complex views and, sometimes, we want to set some defaults for the view through DBSETPROP or CURSORSETPROP that we want to remain persistant, that is, always in effect unless otherwise overridden.

So, what to do? Well, there's a neat tool that generates code that can reconstruct a database. It's called GENDBC and resides in \VFP98\TOOLS\GENDBC. Running GENDBC producers a PRG that can rebuild the DBC. This is step one.

Step two is to take the PRG that GENDBC created and strip out everything that's not a view. This leaves nothing but view definition code. Now, go into that code and modified the DBSETPROPs functions as desired. Make sure that you have the command OPEN DATABASE myDBC EXCLUSIVE as the first line and CLOSE DATA as the last line of the PRG.

Now save the PRG in the directory where your data resides. Call it GenViews. Easy enough.

Now, everytime that circumstances call for a change to a view or you want to experiment with a view setting or structure, just modify GenViews as appropriate and rerun it. That's it!

Works everytime and it's a big time saver, not to mention a great debugging tool for those problem views.