Appreciate your reply.

I'd agree that ODBC are outdated as opposed to OLE DB but the level of effort to create totally frontend and backend independant App could make you lean towards that approach.

Also if the middle tier opens and closes views in addition to data validation and business rules enforcement and the Front End relies on calls to the middle tier to get to the data, that would make it 3/N Tier design not 2. In other words, remote views are never in data env. of the form or explicity mentioned in 'load' methods of the form/form based classes or prg's but the load method would contain something like

'oContract.getContract('x').