>Gil, Thanks. I appreciate your comments. I am back on track. The real stumper now is how to get an incremental search on a date field, since if the whole date is not entered it is invalid, yet incrementalchange fires on each keystroke.
>Jeff
>

That's a tricky one. I usually try to emulate it with keeping the entered part of the date and stuffing it over today. For instance, if today is 26th of Feb, the date would read (in your case) as 022698. Now if user searches for November 13th 1996, I change the value like this

1 122698 26 dec 98
1 112698 26 nov 98
1 111698 16 nov 98
3 111398 13 nov 98
9 111398 13 nov 98
6 111396 13 nov 96

I collect the characters typed into a string and stuff it like this:

* discard delimiters
searchdatestr=stuff( chrt(dtoc(date()),"/.-",""), 1, len(chrtyped), chrtyped)
searchdate=ctod(searchdatestr)

This worked ince in Hungary, because they have a yymmdd date as natural for their lanugage (we use dmy here, also comes out somewhat clumsy). I ended up forcing YMD date for incremental search, and, believe me, users prefer pageup/down or straightforward typing in the date, than incremental search on it. IMHO, incremental search is great for strings, and strings alone.