Michael,

>To reiterate briefly: 1. Do you feel that subclassing the vfp dataenvironment is more headache than it is worth? 2. Is the self-contained business object a good thing or should you be able to manipulate data directly?>

1. We do quite a bit of application development using our own Codebook for Mere Mortals framework, and I personally feel that it *is* worth the effort to subclass the data environment. It does call for just a little more work but the end result of flexibility has been well worth it...Especially if you are thinking about upsizing your application to Client-Server.

If you are familiar with Codebook you are probably aware of Dynamic View Cursors that allow you to switch between local and remote data dynamically. This isn't possible with the standard VFP data environments which hard-code your data access.

2. Having all data access take place through the business object is more than just a nice OOP concept. It provides a much cleaner, easier to maintain, scalable application.

Regards,
Kevin McNeish
www.oakleafsd.com