Hi Jim,


>My position on this is a simple one. Primary Indexes are a feature of VFP, thay have no direct involvement on the Primary Key to a table except that they are often (usually) created using the PK as the index key. I have no issue with using a filter on a Primary Index, I do have an issue on using a Primary Key for a table that may have duplicate values in that table.

One question though to straighten up things:

Do you regard a table as a Relation ? Only in a relation duplicate rows cannot exists. Tables have deleted records, relations do not...

My definition of a table: A Table is a relation minus the deleted records. In that way I don't have any problems with repeatedly inserting and deleting the same PK values. The RM neither does have this limitation.

But note that the original problem lies elsewhere. This is not an issue whether or not to use artificial keys, but to secure that a (intelligent) key is unique (like a social security number). I've noted that the best way to secure uniqueness of this intelligent value is a filtered candidate index. What is your standpoint ?

>If one decides to use a VFP table and one decides to use the deletion mechanism of VFP, then one MUST address the issue that the deleted records EXIST. They do exist in VFP and there is no way around that.

Again, since you didn't answer me this one: Do we agree that there is no way to implement a RI mechanism in VFP which does not ignore the existance of deleted records ?

If not I'm really curious how your RI mechanism looks like...

Walter,