Dear Paul:

In your field validation, do you allow any of the fields to be blank? If you do does the index involve the ALLTRIM command when you concatenate the string together? If you do allow blanks and you use the ALLTRIM (or any other trim command) you are creating the following potential problem:

FIELD1: EMP_ID C(10)
FIELD2: ACCT_NO C(20)
FIELD3: WORKCODE C(10)

RECORD EMP_ID ACCT_NO WORKCODE
1 JWS JWS001 ACCTING
2 RLS RLS002 ACCTING
3 TLP RLS003

Now, the compound index of these three fields looks like if you use ALLTRIM for the WORKCODE field:

JWS JWS001 ACCTING
RLS RLS002 ACCTING
TLP RLS003 |

I put the "|" character in to show that the size of the index has been changed by the inclusion of the ALLTRIM(). The ALLTRIM has introduced the "NULL" issue into the index equation. I do not believe that FPW or FP for DOS deals with "NULL" or indexes that change field size in a stable fashion.

What do you think?

Regards,

Jim Smith