>>Private DS allows to move data pointers independently in work areas belonging to different DS, and correspondingly to different forms. It's not the only way, but natural one, especially if you use row buffering.
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>I was pretty well forced to use private DS by the design of Visual FoxExpress. But the fact is that when the user navigates to a new record in one form, I want that change to be reflected in all of the other forms (to the extent that they refer to that table.) I solved my problem by keeping a global key value for each table and locating those records when a form is activated.
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>But if I were writing my own framework I wouldn't use private DS at all.
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>Peter Robinson

There are lots of reasons why a user might want to view more than one record of a given table at the same time. This means multiple instances of the same form. Private DSs are a natural way to handle this. It would be difficult at best to support this - especially if you're going to use buffering - without using private DSs.

I would suggest that a general purpose framework should support this functionality.