>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? > >Any comments are appreciated. As to 1. you can get back to visual anytime. Instantiate your programmatically redesigned DE, say Set Classlib to RedefDE.prg MyDE_po=CreateObject("mydataenv") MyDE_po.SaveAsClass("MyDataEnvironment","MyClassLib") You can use myclasslib.vcx to pull your dataenv object to your form, so it's back to visual quite soon. As for 2. maybe you should have your business object AddObjected somewhere upstream, maybe in your application object, and simply call it whenever it's needed. If it has to be instantiated on forms here and there... well, it may be tricky, but sounds feasible. No, I haven't tried any of that. Just thinking loud.