Hi Alex,

Sure, you could use that approach, but I would have thought that with "overriding all rules just for the import" and then "a procedure that ran only once and did more complicated changes such as filling a new field with a default, etc" plus "Things such as rights would not be moved over, but I can deal with those separately", it would be more "error prone" than keeping track of your changes as you make thme to the development box and having them applied automatically from any app instance that starts up.

YMMV of course ...

Cheers,

Andrew

>Andrew,
>
>As long as I have you on the horn:
>
>I would like to add a function to your app to upgrade database structure at customer sites without having to keep meticulous track of all changes and then repeating each one at each site. That is error prone.
>
>In the past I have found a flexible and more fail safe approach: Make a copy of an empty database that has the correct structure, procedures, indices, etc. and then APPEND FROM the old records to it via the VFP front end, overriding all rules just for the import. This was followed by a procedure that ran only once and did more complicated changes such as filling a new field with a default, etc. Do you think this approach sounds possible? Things such as rights would not be moved over, but I can deal with those separately.
>
>In the past the situation I had was far simpler, just a bunch of free tables in a directory, but it sounds feasible to me. What do you think?
>
>Alex