>so I'm trying to get a grasp on views and how they relate to the tables in a dbf. I also need some info on parameterized views. Can anyone please give me a basic(very basic) explanation of what a view and a parameterized view is.

Well, if you haven't done so yet, start by reading Chapters 5 and 6 of the VFP Users Guide (in the OnLine Help that came with VFP) and Chapter 8 of the Programmer's Reference (also part of the OnLine Help.)

A parameterized view is nothing more than a view (a specialized type of query that can be based on one or more tables, treated as if the result were in and of itself a flat table) that has embedded parameters (variables) that can be set to set the specific values of a an expression at runtime. The parameterized view has predefined variable references stored in it; if it finds matching variables in scope when a USE or REQUERY() occurs, it uses the presently-defined values, otherwise, it'll pop a little dialog box to prompt you for the value of the variable at runtime.

A simple example - I have a table called Members that includes the name and address information for people that looks something like:

Name C(50),StreetAddr C(50), City C(25), State C(2), Zipcode C(10)

I have a section of the application where I need to work with just people from CT; I could create a view in my DBC that looked like

CREATE SQL VIEW CTResidents AS SELECT * FROM Members WHERE State = 'CT'

If I now needed the Georgia residents, I could have a second view

CREATE SQL VIEW GAResidents AS SELECT * FROM Members WHERE State = 'GA'

Using this approach, you'd need 50 separate views. Instead, why not write one view that takes a parameter value for the value to check in my WHERE clause?

CREATE SQL VIEW StateRes1 AS SELECT * FROM Members WHERE State = ?cResState

The ?cResState tells VFP that, if a variable cResState is in scope, it should be used as the argument in the WHERE clause. If the variable cResState does not exist, VFP will pop up a dialog box asking you to fill in the value for cResState.

Parameters can be used anywhere on the right side of a compare operator, or as an argument in an expression - there are complications when you try to set up parameterized views where you need to macro-expand the parameter variable at runtime, although its fairly trivial to use them in EVAL().

There's considerably more to the topic, but this should give you a simple idea of what a parameterized view does.