Jim,
thanks for replying...

>If you are usign PDS and other forms may have the table open Don't open it exclusively. Exclusive use of a table should be avoided except for the administrative activities that absolutley get exclusive use.

agreed - but this is one of those admin cases...

>
>Second, The table may not be open with teh alias of UserFiel, it may ahve some other alias.

ah - thats new - you mean, even though I've opened it as 'userfile' in the PDS, the rest of the app may not see it as that?


>>The other issue that I can't wrap my head round is the disappearing form name!
>
>A form is an object, objects have a name property. The contents of the object's name property is not necessarily the same as the variable name for the object reference (it may be, but you can't depend on it).
>
>You can use _screen.activeform as you have foudn out, but better than that is to create a form manager object that launches all forms and keeps track of them.

sounds useful, where can I find an example of that approach?

Harry