>I have a requirement to tell whether the current controlling index tag has been set ASCENDING or DESCENDING. Is there anything in VFP that will return this status?

Be aware that ASCENDING/DESCENDING involves one of MS's most "favorite" bugs ...

Why favorite ? Because they haven't bothered to fix it since FPW 2.5 ! (at least).

If you open a table in multiple work areas and use the same ORDER for each work area and in the last SET ORDER TO xxx DESCENDING, then ALL work areas will revert to DESCENDING. If you then SET ORDER TO xxx ASCENDING, then ALL work areas will now revert to ASCENDING !

And if I remember correctly, this even applies ACROSS "private" data sessions.

I think I've even traced some "Illegal Offset" problems to this scenario.