Thank you David,

Sorry that I have been out of circulation. I have realised that most of the things I have to do I resolved by custom objects keeping all the properties and just using drawing tools to represent them on the screen. There was actually no need to have visual objects on screen, so I managed quite well. All I needed was to make dumb drawings of the objects. All calculations took place on the abstract objects.

I have only one problem left, which is to print the drawing. I could have probably programatically drawn on a report form (I have done that before) but there are no diagonal lines on the report formatter. So, I am left with two options:

1) Finding a way to send the drawing that I have on screen to the printer. I don't think FoxPro can do this, but correct me if I am wrong.
2) Go back to the Visio scenario. However, as this would require anyone using my software to have visio, and this time I really only want to make a sketch drawing, is it possible to automated, say, Paint, in the same way. The advantage is that everyone with Windows has paint, so he needs no special software.

Would you have any idea about this?

Steven



>Steven,
>
>Visio is an excellent automation client. MSDN has all of the docs online, it's included in the last couple of MS Office releases. The help is an optionally installed component though.
>
>http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/modcore/html/degrfmicrosoftvisioobjectmodel.asp
> is one starting point
>
>>Sounds like an excellent idea. Where can I learn more about this? I guess Visio can be automated with VBA. Anywhere where the object model of VISIO is documented.