Ahhh, John, you be so smart! I will work on that angle. I want the VFP front to work efficiently, because the prototype being created is to convince management that it is a better way to go than that kludgy Developer2000. And my Oracle experience is rather sparse.


>Hey Doug,
>
>I don't think you want all that roundtripping going on: your best bet may be to create a stored proc in Oracle and have that proc return a result set based on the criteria. Trying to manage a complicated query like that from the front-end will be murderous.
>
>
>>I am embarking on unknown territory in creating a VFP front for a rather large Oracle database.
>>
>>When my form opens, I want it to be blank, and the user will then select one of four fields as criteria for a query. Then the query is sent to the database and retrieves one record for updating. The one record is fields from 8 or 9 tables with verious join conditions and is structured in a rather complicated view. several of the fields will be modifiable by the user and then I want to update the database with the additional or updated data.
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>>I use noDataOnLoad, and do not retrieve data until the query runs. In a VFP database I would have the four fields indexed and do a seek to locate the appropiate record. But views are not indexed, so must I somehow invoke the ORACLE index and search for the matching field, before executing the query?
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>>The question is how to retrieve that record without having to scan all these tables? I guess I am spoiled by indexdeek()