Calvin;

As has been pointed out you do not have to use a dbc. There are many reasons to use it or to not use it. This should be driven by an application requirement and for no other reason. Excuse the analogy, some cars have the ability to go 155 miles per hour. You do not always have to go at maximum speed. You go at whatever speed is dictated by safety and driving requirements.

If you are going to use buffering or a dbc you have to do more than home work. One thing I did was to create a form capable of saving and displaying different values at different places along the way to saving a record. I had several forms instantiated at once to observe record contention and learned how to resolve that problem.

As for a primary key generator, xBase in any form lets you “roll your own”! That is it does not have a number of things required for a data based application that the developer must supply. You can accomplish this by writing application specific code or use an application framework. Frameworks take into account all types of possibilities of how to create an application. Sometimes having more than one way to do anything can be a pain.

Above all my recommendation is to become familiar with anything new offline. Do not let your users be your testers! :)


Tom



>I rewrote my companies major product in VFP6 and now in VFP7 using the Stonefield Database toolkit and the DBC. I thought that by doing this the troubles that I had occasionally had in FoxDOS where sometimes postings to multiple tables would not complete posting would be a thing of past (records written in one table but not another). Think again! The problem remains, perhaps worse. I know that the records get written because they are wrapped in bullet proof transactions, but records just disappear. I am told that this is because of header or index problems, but the why of the thing makes little difference. To make matters worse, I am now rewriting an inhouse app not using the DBC and am finding that screens come up MUCH faster and that not having to worry about buffering etc makes the code much simpler. The 'Scatter Name' command is a great enhancement to 'scatter memvar' because it solves the scope problem. Without the DBC and Stonefield managing updates is more problematic but I had
>7 years of experience in DOS with doing that and have canned routines to handle just about every problem. I wish I had never heard the term 'primary key'. If I had a simple way to rip the DBC out of my app I would do it in a heartbeat. I would appreciate the views of others on this subject.