Via the MMC, I created a simple table in MSDE (workstation version of MSSQL7) called worddocs. It's for holding a path to an original word document (text) and a version of a word document (blob). So I have:

COLUMNNAME        DATATYPE     LENGTH    ...
cTitle            char         239
bDocument         binary       10
iID               int          4         primary key

I then made my little DSN (would prefer to go dsnless on this if anyone can throw me a bone on that) and then made a dbc and my view in the command window:

create view worddocs_vw remote connection connect1 as select * from worddocs

But cTitle comes out in the VFP view as type memo and bDocument comes out at memo(binary). I want cTitle to come out as char and bDocument as general and iID as integer.

VFP isn't automatically translating anything. USEing the table and doing list stru, I get:

FIELD NAME       TYPE           WIDTH
cTitle           Memo           4
bDocument        Memo (binary)  4
iID              Integer        4

When I was going remote views on Oracle 7.3, the translation was working OK. MSSQL7 is ignoring me.

In the (near) future, I am going to be staring at around 1,400 MSSQL7 tables that I was going to use remote views on, so manually doing dbsetprop() on every column will kill me - especially since the DBAs may be changing the back-end table structure(s) at will.

Maybe using some kind of data conversion class will help me here? I am lost on something that is probably right under my nose....

Thanks for helping!