>Hi Michelle,
>
>We have gone through the same situation with table updating with several applications across dozens of clients. Over the course of more than a year of maintaing sites we have tried every way possible to ease the burden of maintain clients.
>
>Here are a few things:
>
>1. If you can justify the cost to buy Stonefield database toolkit you should do it. Stonefield has not solved all of our problems but for anything but the most complex applications it will make database updates a breeze.
>
>2. A more economic approach would be to look at the GenDBC.prg utility that comes with VFP. With a moderate amount of hacking of the GenDBC you can create utilities to update your databases and aid in rebuilding indexes. If you can't understand the GENDBC writing a reliable database updater yourself from scratch would be only asking for trouble. Study the code it produces.
>
>3. If your databases are complicated with foreign key indexes, filters on primary keys, cross database references, etc. then I'm not sure it will ever be real easy.
>
>4. Did I say to consider StoneField. It will probably solve your problem in 2 hours and you can work on all the other stuff you need to worry about. Stonefield also includes full source code you can learn alot from.
>
>On another note. While your are at it you should probably look at getting Codebook by Flash Management. Stonefield is build to integrate smoothly with Codebook and between the two make a great developers toolkit. For the $40 or so the book costs you will learn more about VFP than any thing else out there. Even if you don't use the framework for your actual applications understanding it will give you insight to VFP and how to build true object oriented business applications.


Since we only have free tables in this program, it's not so complicated. I mis-titled my post when I said "databases". (Not to mention that "midify"... :)

With the fake command editor integrated into the application, I am able to do all that I need to the tables. (Arg! I just typed "databases" instead of tables again)

That book you mentioned sounds interesting. I'll look into that. But the Stonefield stuff is probably more than I need right now.

Thanks,