Hi Roxanne,

I'm afraid I cannot help you with you xCase problems but I can make some comments regarding your project. I'm currently working on a project with 50-60 dbf's, that I do have mapped out on an ERD. I don't envy your problem. I wouldn't like to work with a DBC with many more tables.
From what I can tell your modular and data breakdowns are logical and I don't think you have gone over the edge in any way :-)
The one area that raises my suspicions a little are your "Processed Tables" and "Report Tables". Every time I have attempted to create psuedo tables for the benefit of processing I have regretted it at a later point. The maintainence over head is very painful, but I guess that's why you are working with xCase. I suspect that many of these psuedo tables could be replaced by views or stored procedures that generate cursors. If you really must make the data persistant, could you not create tables using SELECT INTO TABLE and then clean them up afterwards.

The other advantage of views and cursors from stored procedures is it is usually pretty easy to determine where the data came from when people come questioning.

One technique that I have always wanted to really test out on a serious application is the OBDC text file driver. Using VFP's remote views and the OBDC textfile driver it is possible to do SQL's directly on the external text files. This means that your pre-process step could generate the joined and replicated tables directly from the text files without the APPEND FROM step. I have no-idea what the performance of this driver is like in comparison to the append from. It also means that you would now have a s an OBDC Datasources to manage for each text file. But it would remove a bunch more tables. I just thought I would mention it.

I'm currently working on one project with two databases and a second with only one. The only significant differences are the RI builder will not generate code that will enforce relations between DBC's and when you use stored procedures you have to make sure the correct DB is selected. This becomes a bit of a pain when using private datasessions as the do a SET DATABASE TO whenever they are initialized.

I'll think some more about this and let you know if I have anymore ideas.

Darrel