>I took your suggestion(s) and tried putting an ON ERROR DO texterr statement in the control's (a textbox) gotfocus event. That didn't call my error routine so instead I used the control's error event, tested for error number 1582 and then used dbGetProp() to retrieve the error message text from the DBC. That works fine and for now satisfies my curiosity. Thanks for the help.
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The error event is the proper place for it. There is an excellent article in error handling in VFP at www.stonefield.com