>I'm requesting assistance with views.
>
>This is a simple straightforward attempt to gather all the "orders" from an orders.dbf for a particular customer. The record pointer is already positioned at the right customer in the customer.dbf when the view is invoked.
>
>(1) In the view designer I use the filter tab to say orders.custno=customer.custno. When I exit the view designer, it puts quotes around the "customer.custno", like so. Each time I edit the filter to remove the quotes, the view designer puts them back in. Surely, I'm overlooking something. I even tried creating a form property to hold the custno and made the filter read orders.custno=thisform.custno, but that too failed.

You should create parameterized view with order.custno=?nCustno. In your code you fire:
nCustno=customer.custno
select yourview
=requery()

>(2) Earlier I had problems with the view definition disappearing, but I discovered I had not included the path to the source files, and that problem was fixed. Now, however, my view does not seem to recognize the source file's index tag (CDX), therefore it does not use Rushmore to do its search, and is very slow as a consequence. I'm not sure what I did, but during my testing, there were a few times when the view did indeed function very rapidly (and therfore must have been using Rushmore) I don't know what was different when I had success. But I can't seem to recreate the successful combination of settings.

If view and tables are part of the same DBC, then I don't see how you could get in troubles.

>(3) If I create the view programatically (in my form's code somewhere), how can I test for the existence of the view, so that once the view is created, subsequent program executions will not attempt to recreate it. (or will "set safety off" avoid errors?) I am using REQUERY() each time the user choses a different customer.

If USED("yourview")
=messagebox("It is in use")
Endif