That's a good idea Barbara. Depending what your connection is for synchronizing over the web Larry, this would be a good addition to your design.

Cheers

>Colin & Larry,
>Years ago I had a Clipper app that worked like this, except I had a log file which kept a record for each change made. Record had the table, PK, fieldname, old value, new value and type (since values were stored as character data in memos) plus a few flags for New, Deleted, etc.. Only the log file needed to be uploaded, which saved a lot of time on old modems. We didn't flag the original tables, instead we printed a report of "Present value in master table doesn't equal old value OR new value, don't update" entries. We found that we only had 2-3 per week of these, although files from 10 branch offices plus the main handled about 10,000 log records per week.
>
>Barbara
>
>
>>Sounds good. I wrote an app very similar to this except it was for users to take data to a job site, so they logged into the network, downloaded needed data to notebook, updated on job site and when back in the office logged in and uploaded changes.
>>
>>My approach to updates was this:
>>
>>1. Like you, downloaded records were flagged with user id and were readonly to all other users while "checked-out".
>>
>>For upload:
>>
>>2. SET DELETED OFF
>>3. SCAN / ENDSCAN through local tables
>>4. For each record, SEEK in master tables
>>5. If local record was deleted, delete master record, otherwise replace all fields with fields from local record
>>6. Remove user id.
>>
>>HTH