The DBC is a table itself, so you could always just append a record to the DBC table and store the date value in the property field, albeit in a string format.

Although not orthodox, the power tools don't seem to mind that there is an extra record in the DBC.

Mace

>Nice idea Mace unfortunately the dbc contains no tables so I was hoping to use its structure - I've currently set it to use DBGetProp and the Comment field but this doesn't seem ideal.
>
>Thanks for the input.
>Caroline
>
>>Hi Caroline,
>>
>>Can't you have a simple datetime field in the local database the holds the date and time that the last download was performed. It would then be a simple case to compare this value against the datetime of your server db and download it if necessary.
>>
>>Mace
>>
>>>Martin
>>>
>>>Thanks for that but what I'm actually after is a quick and easy way of indicating that the local copy of my program needs to upload, from the server, a new copy of the database (that just contains views) when I've changed/added a view definition.
>>>
>>>Is that clearer?
>>>Thanks for any ideas.
>>>Caroline