There are BROWSE options where you can define what fields to display, which ones are read only, etc.

BROWSE FIELDS cust_id:R, company

where :R means the cust_id field is read only.

>Thanks, Mark!
>Well, yeah, got a lot of metadata already and generalized search,...
>I just wanted to be lazy with the BROWSE, hoped to catch the cryptic error message and supplant it with a real German one.
>
>And my first impression was, that VFP allowed duplicate keys in the BROWSE. About further inspection it seems it DOES NOT really SAVE, but REVERT, so I´m ok with that behavior for now.
>
>I fear grid performance with, say, 500K records, which is ok with a simple BROWSE. Guess I´ll play a little bit...