Hi Cindy,

I'll quench your curiosity... It's for the invoicing part of the app I'm working on.

My client sends out invoices and receives payments. Sometimes, one payment covers several invoices, sometimes a partial payment is to be applied PROPORTIONALLY to several invoices.

For example, if we have two invoices, for $45 and $90 and we receive a payment of $60, $20 go to the first invoice, and $40 to the second.

To make things REAL interesting, the user should be able to see all these invoices in a grid (like quickbooks), and over-ride the way the payments are applied (again, like quickbooks).

Since I haven't been able to find a way to base a grid on an array or some ephimere structure, I decided that a temporary table should do.

Now, why on the local harddrive? Because that takes care of segmenting the application. If several people want to enter payments at the same time, I don't have to worry about the logic to keep each user's temporary data separate from the other because it's kept in completely separate places.

So far, things seem to be working. I managed to figure out where in the business object to stick the logic to create the temporary table. Now all I have left is writing the rest of the logic for the form to work as it's supposed.

Kinda like: how do you sculpt an elephant? Well, you take a huge block of marble and you remove everything that doesn't look like one...

Thanks for asking!

Alex


>Alex,
>
>I can't get past wondering why you're needing a table on the hard drive. There was one of these "template tables" in an application I inherited and the first thing I did was to put the template on the network and use AFIELDS() and CREATE CURSOR FROM ARRAY... to make a cursor from the table. The resulting cursor was writeable too!
>
>What that doesn't allow for is a particular batch of data that persists from session to session. If you're using ODBC you could use an offline view.
>
>But of course none of my curiousity helps you with your question! ;-)
>
>
>
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>>I need to create temporary tables.
>>
>>I think I was able to set up a business object that will bring up a cursor based on a free table that lives in the local hard disk.
>>
>>Now, the hard part is to decide where to put the code for actually CREATING a free table on the fly if it doesn't exist or actually zapping the table if it does exist.
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>>I'm considering the business object's init method but am not 100% sure about this.
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>>Ideas, as usual, are more than welcome!
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>>THanks!
>>
>>Alex