Robert,

>Thanks for the reply. However, I'm surpised at what you said that the View Designer is not meant to be a "two-way" tool. I heard (and read) may praised that Vfp8 finally made the SQL page "two-way." I know that there are limits to the complexity that the view designer can handle.

I sit corrected *g* this is a change I'd missed along the line.

Have you read the constraints listed in the help topic "Customizing Views Using SQL SELECT Statements"

>However, after a little more experimenting (see my other posts) I discovered that the problem was in my "editing" of the SQL page but, rather, the View Designer, could not even open the view that it had just saved. Althoug, the view can be called with the desired results, I can't open it with getting the error. I have discovered that I can delete the two braces {} and the 'oj' following the first brace and Vfp wil gladly reload the designer.

Where are these {} and old style oj syntax coming from? Are you editting them into the SQL? When I add a table into a view in the designer the join dialog popups up asking for the type of join and joining columns. The emitted SQL uses the newer ANSI compliant syntax ( LEFT OUTER JOIN for example).