Mark,

Thanks for your input. It will be helpful as I try to define how I'm going to do this. A couple of questions:

1) Do you put the property/value pairs in the memo field by hand, or you have some sort of front end form that validates, makes sure they are valid entries? In order to make this accessible to end users, I really need to build up a front end that allows endusers to make changes without blowing things up.

2) I'm trying to define a set of properties that would be accessible to endusers vs a set of properties that would be accessible to developers.

3) I'm trying to decide whether ALL the objects in the form should be loaded at runtime from a table, or whether that is overkill, and only a certain subset of the properties should be loaded, and the objects should be on the form at design time.

4) I'm wondering whether it is feasible to build a metadatable table about the scx (or vcx?), after I've built it visually, by reading it and writing out each and every property to the metadata table. I know it may seem as if I'm adding an unneccessary layer here - as the scx itself is just a metadata table. But without it I don't think I can track the form 'delta' over time.

5) I have three main business objectives:
1) Ease the pain of updating/integrating my changes with Accountmate 2) Formalize the process of tracking the 'evolution' of form changes 3) Providing an interface to endusers (and developers) that empowers them to make changes in a structured way

6) In your case, I am wondering whether Steven Black's stuff would be relevant. I am only aware that it exists, but don't know the specifics of what it does.

Any additional insights would be appreciated.

Thanks again

>I had this somewhat same issue with a bilingual app where forms have to be either in English or Spanish. The problem was not translating the strings from English to Spanish. The problem was positioning all the controls on the forms because of the widely differing string lengths. I started out with 2 set of forms, but maintenance was a freaking nightmare.
>
>So, I came up with a custom method called at the END of my form base class INIT. I have a table that has fields for the formname, the object name on the form, the full hierarchy of the parent of the object, and a memo field that has various property setting for the object's Spanish settings [1 property = "value" setting per line in the memo field]. The method called by the form INIT scans the table for all records that match the form name, resetting the caption of objects that have captions, setting their top/left properties, and any other property I placed in the memo field.