Rodney,

You are right in thinking that any particular table can sometimes be the "parent" and sometimes be the "child."

One difference between using a view which relates the data for you, and setting a relation among the tables is scalability. IF your app were ever to move to an SQL database and you did a lot of work through related tables, you would be in for a re-write. If you know that you would NEVER want to scale to an SQL database, the xBase commands will work nicely.

With views, the back end can be anywhere without a lot of change to the app itself, but the views themselves can be related using the xBase commands.

Now I'm sure I've confused you even further! ;-)



>What is the most popular method for multi user environment data manip? Direct to table or through a view? What about performance? Cast your vote now!
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>No, really. I'm wondering because I was using direct table manipulation, and came across a situation. Namely, one transaction (parent1) can have many products (child1), but one customer (parent2) can have many transactions (child2).
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>I actually need the transaction to be the parent and the customer to be the child (so when the transaction is selected, the pointer in the customer table is sitting on the right record). I know I can do it with a view, but can't it be done with a table to table relationship? and again, which would be more beneficial?
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>Rodney