I am doing fewer desktop apps these days, and in the project in question I am ultimately creating a MTS-hosted .DLL and using .ASP as the front end; VFP is the middle-tier in a setup to manage Oracle/MSSQL data. I just can't use forms as a means to manage the data in this case.

I have a good handler for doing timestamping for my rows. I have some timestamp columns -
creation_dt
last_update_dt
deletion_dt
created_by_user_id
last_updated_by_user_id
deleted_by_user_id
and in the table properties, I put "timestamp()" in the Record Level Validation Rule. So every time I move off of the record, I am running timestamp.prg which has a small DO CASE statement to modify the appropriate columns. The single handler takes care of the possible conditions on the row. And as the business requirements change, I only have to modify timestamp.prg and recompile the .DLL.

Since I can't seem to do that for fields, I will have to get creative somehow...

And to give you more insight on why I'm doing what I'm doing: I have Oracle SQL code to create a database, and since most it is very much like VFP SQL code, I am programatically changing the Oracle-specific-SQL-stuff to VFP-specific-SQL-stuff and ending up with a .prg that I can run to make a database on the fly in the initialize method of my MTDLL. There are a few gaps in the VFPization of the database that I am going to address with VFP functions; row-level timestamping is one thing, but the field-level stuff seems to be something else....