Hi Mike --

Interesting questions. Looks like you're running up against some of the boundaries of the Fox.

As a design decision, I don't change the data type of a parameter within a routine. That's a "side effect" of a subroutine that's not self-documenting and could cause problems down the road.

A couple of ideas:

1. In the method that does the conversion, can you use a local variable for its own processing?

2. Can you pass the value as an object with 2 different data types, the string or the array, and have each method use whichever value is most appropriate?

Jay

>Hi All
>
>I need to pass a parameter to a method by reference. The called method may alter the parameter, so I want to push the parameter to a property. The parameter may be a string or an array to begin with. I don't believe the save and restore variables to memo fields / .mem files route would be feasible.
>
>The problem is, if an initial parameter is passed as a string and pushed to a property, and the called program changes the passed parameter to an array, it doesn't seem possible to pop the parameters so as to cause the array to become a string again.
>
>To demonstrate...
>
>Junk.prg
>lcString = "Testing"
>?junk1(@lcString)
>disp memo
>*Notice that lcString is now an array.
>return
>
>junk1.prg
>lParameters tuParameter
>*Push the incoming parameters
>local luParameter
>luParameter = tuParameter
>*Convert the string to an array to do some processing...
>local array laArray[1,1]
>laArray[1,1]="Something else"
>dimension tuParameter[1,1]
>=acopy(laArray,tuParameter)
>*Do the processing
>...
>*Pop the parameter (so that we get back the original string)
>tuParameter = luParameter
>return
>
>I've tried releasing tuParameter before storing luParameter to it. Any ideas?