I want to manipulate data in a cursor that was created either with 'create cursor', or via a select statement. Based upon my experience with cursors of local tables, I knew that if I issued 'select * from mytable into cursor curmytable', that I could not update that cursor, and that I would get the message 'cannot update the cursor'.

Then I mistakenly assumed that the same would apply to a cursor created with:
lnresult=sqlexec('select * from mytable','curmytable'). I now realize that I can in fact append and edit records in this cursor, although they won't be written back to sql server, which is fine.

I am wondering why vfp treats these cursors differently, and what other behaviors are different between the two, and how I can distinguish between the two if I don't know how they were created originally.

Based upon my original incorrect assumption, I wrote very long 'create cursor' statements, and then programmaticaly loaded data into them. I want to rewrite my code now that I know that I can update these types of cursors, but I want to make sure there are no caveats or circumstances under which I won't be able to update such a cursor.

TIA