Hi Alan,

LEFT() function doesn't even work for me. I got a reply in other VFP users and I found out that the length of the first retrieved record determines the output length of the rest. So they suggested that I use PADR() function.

select IIF("." $ objectname, ;
PADR(SUBSTR(objectname,1,AT(".",objectname)-1),20), padr(objectname,20)) ;
from childtable

This statement is now working in my application.

Thanks a lot for your reply anyway.

Nerissa