>I have found an extraordinary amount of new documentation in the VFP8 Help concerning the CursorAdapter Class, and my first reading suggests that it is very thorough. And that's a good thing!
>All in all, I am more confused than enlightened by the documentation. As I said, I find it thorough. But it's like we went right to the microscope without showing 'what' we are looking at first. I'd find it handy to have an nice overview, and in fact I suspect that there's one in there somewhere.
>Does anyone know if there is, and where if so?

Chuck Urwiler wrote a fabulous and very extensive (meaning very long) article on CursorAdapter for the upcoming special issue of CoDe Magazine about VFP8. This issue is being printed today and will be mailed out approximately 3 weeks from now.

Many of your questions will be answered then.

Meanwhile, several of the items you highlighted refer to using schemas to define the structure of cursors instead of allowing the CA to define them automatically. This gives great flexibility and, when combined with the ability to specify functions to transform certain fields, gives you workarounds for just about any data format problems.

Just keep digging, Jim, and experimenting, and also re-read many of the posts Mark McCasland has made here about CA over the past couple of months.