Dale,

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When it happens in the field it, looks just like you would type MODI REPORT from the command window. The window that comes up is the report designer. You can move fields around, see fields, change fonts, etc. The menu at the top even becomes alive and looks and feels just like VFP's menu.
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Yes, I understand this. It *is* the designer, and it *is* exactly the same <s>. (Actually there are a few minor things like I'm not sure you'll see Save As HTML active on the File menu, by default, unless you've filled _GENHTML. I haven't checked this recently.)

And as I told you before, this is the behavior of a report when there is an error in the report. This *would* happen in 9 as well. As far as "debugging" it goes, I don't think there would be anything different in the sense that there is no code running, this is behavior and there is nothing to step through.

What I said was different in 9 was the interactions of the preview window(s), assuming you use object-assisted mode (REPORTB 90). If this interaction, and some event-handling thing you haven't picked up on (for example a variable used in the report going out of scope) is what is going on, then yes you will see a difference. And yes it's quite possible the thing will never occur. If it *did* occur, then yes you could debug it because Xbase code would be running and there would be something to debug.

What would be the same, and what you could not debug or step through would be moving into the Designer because of an error in your report. If the error is still there, then the behavior will still be there. We have not changed anything about this. I do think that such an error is a possible cause, and that the reason it happens rarely is that you have to move back and forth between different windows (possibly back and forth between different Windows applications) in a certain order to see it happen.

As a final item: object-assisted Preview is also different in the way it runs your code. If (for example) you have UDFs in the report, and you move back and forth between different pages in old-style preview, you are triggering code again. Some error here might drop you into the Designer. By contrast, this could not happen in new-style preview, because all pages are cached before the Xbase preview component is invoked.

I hope this is clear....?

>L<