>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.
>

Well, they now have some users who know the difference, and a couple who've educated an attorney about it and are seeking damages for misrepresentation by the VAM reseller.

>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.

I do everything 'interesting' away from VAM and move transactions as much as possible; I've limited my hacking to altering UI behaviors to be more consistent with what our users want, and have frobbed many reports to alter sort orders, shift items on lines, etc. We're still recovering from a piss-poor job of data conversion done by our reseller to move our historical SBT data over - in the book industry, sales are nearly never final, and we have to deal with returns that may be 5 or 6 years old, to a different entity than makes the return, so lots of historical detail is a necessity. And I particularly care for VAM's UI, so our outsode apps dopn't try to mimic its behavior.