>>AccountMate, on the other hand, uses (most of) the entire capability of VFP, including SQL pass-through on the SBS and SQL configurations. The big catch here is that their core modules are proprietary -- you can't see the code AT ALL, and they won't sell it to you. Their big selling point is their accounting principles, which appear to be excellent (their IC system needs some help if you're using both serialized and non-serialized inventory with multiple bins). Modifications to VAM are *significantly* less difficult than SBT, -UNLESS- you need to augment or override some part of the core functionality, in which case you're SOL. Anyone thinking about modifying VAM code should attend their developers' workshop in CA -- it's three days VERY well spent.
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>Evan, I've found even UI stuff to require hacking the SCXs repetitively; is there a hook to subclass UI elements that I'm not aware of? My real problem is with the dealer who told us "no problem - we can sell you full source code". I'd like to do some unspeakable things to him, but "temporary" insanity doesn't work as a plea in my case... ;-)
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>I'd agree that modifying what they're willing to let you modify is easier and more maintainable; we just picked up a tool that's suppoosed to help us move our hacks from version to version called "MKT Tools Programming Library" which has been unimpressive so far - nothing I can't do using SourceSafe to run diffs. It does supposedly do some data validation tasks that I've not tested to date.

Ed, believe it or not, even AMS doesn't "subclass" their *own* classes.

When my former company first got VAM/SQL 4.0, just for the (deleted) of it, I attempted to use their base classes and create a new form. Two man-weeks later, I gave up -- their class definitions, especially between the toolbar container and the form, are so interdependent that I was regularly hacking SCXs as you mentioned.

When I asked Tommy Tan, the director of development for AMS, what the deal was, he told me that when AMS developers needed another form, they "took an existing form, cleared off all the existing controls they didn't need and altered the ones they might" (that's close to a direct quote).

And your dealer was only spouting the "party line" -- AMS *still* claims to provide complete source code. Nobody's had the stones or the bucks to go after them on it, I guess.

What was my solution? (g) I created what I called a "sideways library" -- a set of classes that looked almost exactly like the VAM controls, spoke to the VAM internals/tables/etc. when necessary, but worked independently of each other and were MUCH less intertwined. Saved us *megahours* of development time for a shadow application that ran alongside VAM's IC/PO/SO modules.