>Hello,
>
>Reading about 3 tier applications and the use of data manager objects to handle all data, we ask ourselves if there is still any place for using the setting up of the data environment the visual way (against opening tables programmatically). Also data buffering seems useless in these scenarios.
>Is that true or is there still a place for these ?

One of the purposes of data managers is to provide an abstraction layer, so you'd work with just objects, or just aliases (provided your DMs really have them), and you shouldn't care of what are they physically working with - free tables, tables from one .dbc or many .dbcs, views (from the same or a separate dbc, remote/local/offline), or do they shuttle SQL PassThrough strings all the time. You shouldn't care - they are here to manage this.

Buffering is one of the things which would be managed as well - for those data managers which use tables.

Visual DEs, IMO, suffer from
1) bad naming convention - cursor1, cursor2, corsorN don't mean a thing to me; I'd rather have something like cu[Alias] so I wouldn't have to open thirty of them to find the one I need
2) visual works fine while they don't take up too much of your screen; once you reach the limit of 20 or so, it's a mess. I'd rather have them organized in a treeview by relation to the Initial[LY]SelectedAlias (the LY is something I've typed a dozen times and then had to debug to see what was wrong)
3) there's no visual clue to what's the ISA (as above)

You can still have your data managers tie to the tables open in your DE. That may not be pure n-tier gospel, and may introduce some confusion ('where do I do this-and-that, in the DE or in the DMs?'), but is surely feasible. Depending on when do your DMs instantiate (from the for.load or form.init, or are they already on the form as members) you may have the DE instantiated before or after the DMs. You may even instantiate DMs from within the DE if you like and have the DE not opening the tables at all - let the DM's do it for themselves.

There's a multitude of scenarios available. If it's not doable at least three ways, it's not worth doing at all :)