>Now there's a concept...a pessimistic approach to contention with optimistic buffering". Could you elaborate a little? And thanks for the info on ON ERROR.
>That's what I'll try today.
>
>Steve
Steve,

Sure. The pessimistic philosophy simply states that you will secure the right to write at the time that the edit begins. Pessmistic buffering locks resources implicitly within VFP for you while optomistic buffering does not. Both of them cehck for contention at the time of the TableUpdate().

With a pessimistic approach the user is notified of a possible contention for resource before they are allowed to begin editing, with optomistic that contention is not checked until the user want to arite the data.

If you use optimistic buffering then VFP does not get the loick for you, but you can use the RLOCK and FLOCK functions to handle your own locks or even design your own semaphore locking scheme to handle things. This way you are using the pessimistic philosophy but with optomistric buffering.

JimB