>>I have two identical views. I work on one - the other is to remember what I had to start with.
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>>I may add records, delete some, change data, etc. A session may last several hours. At the end of the session I ask: Do you want to keep your changes? If yes, then there is nothing further to do: the view I worked on has what is needed.
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>>However, if the user decides to abandon all changes, then I want to use the second view to put things back as they were. Deleted records should be restored, added records should be abandoned, and changes should be undone.
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>>I am going to delete all the records in my work-view and then append new records from the backup view. Before I go ahead and do that I thought I would ask here to see if there is perhaps another way to accomplish this.
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>>TIA
>>Cyril.
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>First, make sure you understand buffering and how commands like TABLEUPDATE() and TABLEREVERT() work. That is a more common approach to what you're trying to do here.
>
>Second, I'd be very concerned about unsaved data entry sessions lasting "several hours". The first time the app goes down because Win9x decided to hiccup, there was a power bump, etc. your users will scream bloody murder. If you really want to architect your app this way, you'd be well advised to implement an MS Word "Autosave"-type feature - i.e. automatically save pending changes to disk (a temporary table(s) somewhere) every xx minutes.

Thanks for your reply. I am doing tableupdates all the way, so my working view corresponds to the status of the data in the table. What I want is a sort of "global revert" where all changes can be lost and the second view (a copy before any changes) can be restored.