>>>| cursor. Issuing the query and changing the recordsource to the cursor are
>>>
>>>| easy enough, but the indexing is posing a problem, because as far as I
>>>| know, you can only index tables and views. Is the only way to do this to
>>>
>>>SELECT ... INTO CURSOR cMyCursor
>>>
>>>USE DBF('cMyCursor') IN 0 Alias cMyTemporaryTable AGAIN
>>>
>>>USE IN cMyCursor
>>>
>>>SELECT cMyTemporaryTable
>>>
>>>INDEX ON ... TAG ...
>>>
>>>The file name of the table is smth like 348745548.tmp. You don't
>>>have to worry about that. The index file willhave the same name.
>>>
>>>Sorin
>>
>>Sorin- thanks for your reply, this is what I needed. (I think). I'm a little unclear on a thing or 2 however...
>>What is different about the temporary when it is first created as opposed to after being used again? How does VFP decide which ones can be indexed? I guess my question is. technically speaking. what is the difference between a cursor and a temporary table?
>
>Table is dbf file, cursor is tmp file stored in Temporary Files folder. When you close a cursor it's deleted automatically, temp table should be deleted explicitly. Cursor created by SELECT-SQL is read-only and must be opened in another work area (like Sorin suggested) to be modified, indexed, etc. If you created cursor using CREATE CURSOR, it can be modified immediately.

Edward- do you mean to create a cursor, and then append from the SQL cursor? If so, is there a way around having to name and define each field? (table has about 80 fields). I was thinking that I could select into an array and then 'CREATE CURSOR cmytemptable FROM ARRAY cmyarray', but was having problems gettting that to work.

Could you give some example code as to how you would use CREATE CURSOR to accomplish this? BTW- the SQL SELECT statement looks like SELECT * from table where blah blah blah. (there are no explicitly named columns)

Thanks again for your help. BTW- will you be at DevCon next week?

Erik