Craig,

This is not about unrelated tables. When you JOIN two tables, you create a relation between these tables. IMHO, what would be a more appropriate definition is a hierarchical realtionship between tables. One of the major problems with the view designer is the way it handles JOINs. It only supports nested JOINs. This only works if there is a hierachical relationship between the tables (e.g. OrderHeader=>OrderDetails=>Parts). That's why we have the problem Tamar described. However, if the view designer used sequential JOINs the problem would go away.

BTW, this is how JOINs are handled in SQL Server.

Concerning _VIEWDESIGNER, could you please tell me a view designer that can be called from VFP (other than eView/ViewEdit)? I don't have a problem invoking eView from the menu. The real problem is that eView is not replacing a good view designer with a graphical user interface (no offense to Erik).

As someone else mentioned before, it's unacceptable that a database development tool has a designer that is so limited. Adding a _VIEWDESIGNER hook and delegating the problem to the users is unacceptable to me.

>Tamar had a good point about joining unrelated tables. Look at her posting in this thread. Also, if you change the order of the joins, you can often get the view designer to work.
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>As for _VIEWDESIGNER, you could call any view designer you wanted from the GUI.
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>>Craig,
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>>I don't get this. What does a hook like _VIEWDESIGNER change? I can use what I want without a hook. The *real* issue is that there's no good view designer available. Sure I use eView and ViewEdit. I like these fine tools, but they certainly don't replace the view designer that should be part of VFP.
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>>I've mentioned this before, but I really like the view designer that ships with Enterprise Manager in SQL Server. It's the best view designer I have seen - even better than the one in Access.
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>>Change any parameter in any of the 3 panes and the others reflect the changes immediately. It's a perfect 3-way tool! Also, the designer creates sequential JOINs rather than nested.
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>>This is already an MS tool. How hard would it be to port this to VFP? The most difficult part in my opinion is the parsing and the 3-way synchronizing. This is already done.
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>>What really beats me is that I can think of 4 different query/view designers in MS products (SQL Server, Access, VFP, MS Query). Each one uses a completely different interface. If they took the best of each, we'd have a real good designer. Unfortunately for us, the designer in VFP is not only the worst one, but simply unusable when you have more than 2 tables :(
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>>Heck, even MS Query has 2-way support. That is, you can make changes to the SQL code and these changes are reflected graphically.
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>>>IMO, there are other designers as good or better than e-view. How about if the VFP team provides a hook, something like _VIEWDESIGNER. Then you can use what you want.