Thanks Larry, that's exactly my thinking. The tricky part is on append. the entry box for stocknum is a dropdown, which drops down when you click in it to enter the new stocknumber. I've thought of laying a textbox under the dropdown, bind them to the same field, and use the visible property to determine which is used in each circumstance. Do you have a better suggestion?

>For me, the best approach would be to put the form into "Edit/Append" mode and disable/enable other controls as needed. You could create a form-level property that held the mode and add code to the form control's Refresh methods to check this property and determione what to do (e.g. enable itself).
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>Launching a new form is a time and resource consuming event that doesn't need to happen (IMO).
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>>I've created a form that uses a view in the D.E. made up of 3 tables: inventory, customers, and transactn. On the form is a dropdown linked to a field in the view called Stocknum, which is the primary from the inventory table.
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>>In the interactivechange event of the dropdown is a procedure that finds the record in the view with the value selected in the dropdown. The appropriate data from that record is then output to other objects on the form.
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>>I want to add edit and append buttons to this form.
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>>My question is:
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>>For the Edit, is it better to close the form and open a new one with that record, or lock the dropdown and unlock the other objects? Why? (I would prefer the latter for convienence)
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>>Thanks
>>JD