Hello, Hilmar

While the code you provided works to my surprise and I do give you credit for finding this out, I think going by MS documentation is a good strategy for a lot of reasons, some of them are:

* while oldval worked in your example, it won't yield correct results if used outside the trigger therefore limiting your App and focing you to use old strategy like memvars to get old values.
* Without buffering, you lose a basic functionality to roll back changes and you will have to reinvent the wheel to provide it.
* oldval will crash on free tables without buffering.
* There is no gurantee it will keep on working like this in future VFP releases as MS will stand by its claim as to what is required for this command to work. On the other hand, you could hold their feet to the fire if it stopped working as documented.

In short, you are running a lot of risks, some of them not foreseen, when you choose to follow this path.

Software Project Management has been always about risk management and this I simply see as a risk.

Thanks again for bringing my attention to this peculiar behavior of VFP.