>Yes, it would open one alias per level; depending how deep your structure goes it may or may not be too much. One thing I know is that this becomes too slow (I've seen it done with a SQL select into a new cursor each level, then check if any records were selected), so my favorite technique was to build a key which would order the table into its proper tree order. It only took one rebuild for each save, and worked fine for the intended use (reports dictionary, with very few changes over time). Next time the table was simply open ordered by this key and scanned in a single linear pass.

In our case, it's for a treeview. The table is already properly ordered however I feel it's much more cleaner and simplier by using the recursive approach.