This is one of the strangest things I have ever seen.

In our office, we have a Visual Foxpro 3.0 application that accesses data from a Novell NetWare fileserver. Users take orders which are entered as a record in a table through a form which uses optimistic buffering (a typical order-taking model). When they save the order, the TABLEUPDATE command is issued. So far, so simple.

Here is where the crazy stuff starts. If person 1 enters a record and issues TABLEUPDATE, then person 2 running the same application should now be able to see that record in the table right? Wrong! But if person 2 were to close the application and then rerun it, the record will magically appear.

This may have something to do with the fact that the table in which such orders are stored is CONSTANTLY open while the application is running. Somehow the application is not refreshing some information about the table from the fileserver disk.

This makes it difficult to provide up-to-the-minute daily totals of orders taken.

I am just totally clueless on this one.