Somehow, I hit the wrong button, here's the complete text.


Jay,
>George --

>well considered, as always %).

Thanks

- snip -

I snipped the rest of this because I'm really not going to address it point by point. Rather, I wanted to insert a comment or two, if you don't mind.

First, I think that most of us, when it comes to what new features we'd like to see, are fundamentally prejudiced by our own work. The problem is that the Foxteam must make changes that are going to help the greatest number of us without breaking existing code. Sometimes these two needs come into a conflict that has no resolution.

Second, and this does relate to my previous point, many times, however, we can overcome what we see as short-comings in the product from our own POV with some clever coding that builds a tool that can address these. One of the reasons we can do this is that the product allows us, and has allowed us in the past, to do so.

Certainly, in some cases in order to accomplish what we need to do, we have to resort to a kludge. In others, it can be done simply and easily. Back in FPD, the GENPD.APP came with source code. There was nothing to stop folks from modifying it to handle certain situations. For example, I modified it so that it would recognize the value stored in the _PPITCH system variable. This allowed me to open the report as a table, get the page width and set the variable accordingly.

Today if you don't like the fact that the expression builder doesn't display cursor fields in the table list, you can globally replace it with one of your own. Don't like the view designer, write your own. Don't like the way one of the wizards work, replace it. I personally like this approach and hope that it continues.