Nope, that's not what I'm after either. Thank you all for helping, though. I do appreciate it. I'm bad at explaining things like this.

What I am saying is that I have a control 'myControl' (e.g. an object subclassed from CONTROL) which can contain multiple other controls which correspond to variables I am adding to the top-level class. The properties and methods of the lower-level controls are not accesible (they're PRIVATE) which is how I want it.

I know that one can update these values to the inner-controls at runtime (by using Refresh(), etc...) However, I would like to update the inner controls during design time. So I can see how changes in things like color, width, etc... affect the layout of the control on the form without having to run the form all the time.

Basically, I want some way to tell the form designer that this custom property here 'myControl.cValue' is linked to this label (or textfield or button or whatever) here 'myControl.lblPrompt.Caption'.

Thanks, again

Tom

P.S. The knicks did win! Exciting game too! Perhaps I can start watching them again.

>Tom:
>
>>myControl.myLabel.Caption=cCaption).
>
>A VFP control that is capable of displaying a caption has a "caption" property. If you take a VFP base class and subclass it, if it (the base class) has a caption property, you just set a value to it from the property sheet and it will be reflected in the control in the form editor. I'm not sure there is much more to it than this.
>
>If you want a programatic way of assigning a value to the caption property without setting it in the caption sheet (and not at runtime), take a look at the VFP function SYS(1270) in help. Basically, hover your mouse pointer over the control you are interested in. In the command window, do
>
>o = sys(1270)
>
>This will give you an object reference to the control in "o". Then, you can say something like.
>
>o.caption = 'MyCaption'
>
>Hope this helps.
>
>-Gary