Thanks...I am going to experiment

Take care,
Joe

>>Please excuse my ignorance, but I don't use the form DE very often. I set-up my cursors, etc. before I get into a form. The reason I do this is that our data is "different"...when a user edits data, we need an effective date of change and we need to save all information (before and after changes)...this is because we need specific information for any specific day.
>>
>>Anyways, because I do this, I just issue commands like
>>
>>USE ("DataLocation"+datafile)
>>
>>before the DO FORM command. The DataLocation variable (or property) will map the data's source directory, depending on what network node you are on.
>>
>>I have a question: How are multi-user DE's usually handled? In other words, if the DBC is at the file server, how do I tell the system where to find the DBC?
>>
>>We have some forms with non-empty DE's, but they all use free tables and they are used before the Do FORM command...and this works fine for networked drives (using the above method), but it sounds like it won't work for DBCs.
>>
>>Joe
>Hi Joe,
>For your special case you may want to look at "offline database backups" in files section. Although the main purpose of it, is to log and update from two sites physically not connected, it logs the changed, added and deleted in specific dirs, based on the original unchanged data.
>If there is only one DBC or multiple DBC's with unique names, then on the development machine I put all in "..\app\data" dir. In startup or config.fpw, "set path to data;..". When I put the app on the file server, I also create a data subdir as "\\fileserver\..\app\data". When app is run from "\\fileserver\..\app" the data is used from "\\fileserver\..\app\data". That is in other words : if you copy the exe and data dirs to 1-"\\fileserver\..\app\data" and 2-"\\fileserver\..\app1\data" then run the exe in two different tasks from both app and app1, each one uses its own data subdir to locate dbc and tables. Fortunately despite hard coding VFP is kind enough to use "set path" and in fact locates the data by relative path in this case. The problem is with multiple data1, data2.. directories each with the same dbc and tables having different data, all in "set path". In this case you should change the to the correct one in DE on the fly.
>Cetin