Matt,

It looks like your only option is (if it's even possible) to come up with what would otherwise be an invalid combination and use that as a special marker.

Alternatively you could do something along the lines of what VFP (seems to) does with NULLs - have a second string corresponding to the first where its only purpose is to signify yes/no to hide completely or not.

Good luck,

JimN

>Hi,
>
>I'm currently working on a large existing system.
>
>The system includes user security as follows:
>
>Each user can have varying degrees of access to various modules in the system.
>
>The following items can be viewed by a user in each module:
>
>"Calendar"
>"Graph"
>"Reports"
>"Archive"
>"Delete"
>"New"
>"Edit"
>"View Module"
>
>So, we can allow a particular user to view the module but not be able to Delete, Edit etc.
>
>To control this, we use a 64 character string in the user table, each character in the string representing a single module. We use the command BITTEST on each character to determine which rights the user has for each module e.g. if Bit 1 is set, then the user can view the calendar for that module.
>
>This all works well, but we wish to exclude all access to some modules for some users. This would require us to store CHR(0) for that module in the string.
>
>Storing CHR(0) in the string appears to totally screw up our system.
>
>Does anyone know if there is a problem in storing this character in a character field ? We are retrieving the data through ODBC, and any solution we come up with has to work with FoxPro, SQL Server and Oracle back-ends.
>
>Best.
>
>Matt.