That sounds good Nadya! I was considering doing something like that. It might save me a lot of time. I'd like to see the code. I assume you are using some trick like 'use again', to get the cursor to be updatable?
I will email you.

Does it just handle _a or does it handle multiple occurrences - _b _c and also, I have a vague memory that vfp handles things differently if the column name is 10 chars???

>For cases like this we have a special post-processing altering table structure code. It changes all columns with _a to just fieldname. Send me a letter to work, I'll send you the code on Monday.
>
>Could be a Wish List for Toledo.
>
>>In sql server/transact sql when a query such as:
>>
>>select * from sosord, sostrs where sosord.csono=sostrs.csono
>>
>>is executed, the key value appears once in the result set as csono. In vfp you end up with csono_a, and csono_b.
>>
>>If I want my cursor result to be 'clean' and not have the underscores, then I need to explicitly name all the columns, and include the key from only one of the tables, once. But this results in very long query statements. I wrote a little routine to retrieve all of the column names for a given table into a formatted select string, and put it on the clipboard. This helps speed things up, but I still would be able to use select *.
>>
>>Is there any syntax, or trick that I can use to shorten my select statements. E.g. I wish there was a keyword like
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>>select * from sosord, sostrs where sosord.csono=sostrs.csono NODUPLICATEKEYVALUES
>>
>>Is there a specific reason why VFP's sql is implemented so differently than TRANSACT-SQL in such a fundamental area?