I've done this exact thing with a client of mine (a trucking company that wants to see all info about a stopoff for a load WITHOUT scrolling horizontally). I started this in VFP3, I believe, and (quickly!) switched on up to 5 and now 6. Anyway, what I did was make a container class filled with textboxes, combos, etc. for all the details of the stopoff (datetime, contact, location, weight, rate, etc.). At runtime, I add this class to the column of a grid. Each row is about 1 or 2 inches tall.

The dispatchers like it but it's buggy and you have to work around some problems with doing this. One that I've still not figured out is selecting the text in the textboxes when getting focus. It simply doesn't work consistantly and I've tried all the workarounds (seltext, sellength, and trying to control the keyboard buffer, etc.) I wish I had done something different (like kicking the dispatchers butts and telling them to live with my original solution) but now I'm stuck with it.

Good luck and happy 'tripping'

- A Hilton


>I am developing an application for a trucking company and am starting to work on a dispatch form. They are currently using Excel to display the information that they use but this has several drawbacks. To me this suggests a grid but the problem is that they need to see so much info about each job (including the 20 trucks assigned) while displaying as many jobs as possible on the form that it needs display more than one row per record. I have started playing with custom controls to locate more than one text box in a container which I can then place in the grid but since I have never seen or heard of anyone doing this I have the feeling that I am going to discover something ugly or am overlooking an obvious alternative. Any thoughts?