I thought this was a good case for an Event Object, but because of VFP newbie
First of all, I'm glad to hear you have hooked up with the people at ISResearch. They also have our framework (I know they recommended it to you <s>) and I we get to banter a lot of ideas back and forth. They are a talented group of developers.
Second, I would personally use event objects for many of the actions you mentioned in your message, such as: ImportFromTextFileEvent, RefreshTablesEvent, RelationalProcessEvent, PrintReportsEvent and so on. Or...you could break these larger events down into smaller events...or have one event call another event. Again, you could accomplish all of this without using events by creating custom methods in your forms...I do this myself. What's nice about events is that you can encapsulate, or package an event in a single class that makes it easy to maintain, reuse and possibly subclass.
However, I understand if you are still cutting your teeth on the concept of business objects, you may want to stay in somewhat familiar territory and gradually introduce yourself to Event Objects, using one or two in an application to start with.
Regards, Kevin McNeish Oak Leaf Enterprises Solution Design, Inc.
Kevin McNeish Eight-Time .NET MVP VFP and iOS Author, Speaker & Trainer Oak Leaf Enterprises, Inc. Chief Architect, MM Framework http://www.oakleafsd.com
