In the long term I would agree - in the short term I just need a reliable way to read a field from disk for the row I am currently sitting on. So far the only working methods seem to be moving to another record and then back, or the REFRESH() command with errors suppressed. Neither seems very elegant.

>Hi Dominic,
>
>Curval() only work if you are using buffering. Refresh() is used to refresh a view that will generally be either Row or Table buffered. The two functions you refer to usually operate on buffered data and you specify that your table is not buffered. To test for conflicts, maybe you should consider buffering your table.
>
>>Using native VFP tables, I have been attempting to check if another network user has changed a record whilst the present user has been editing (no buffering involved).
>>
>>CURVAL() does not return the value from disk, but uses a cached value. SET REFRESH seems to make no difference to anything.
>>
>>If I issue REFRESH(), despite an error (no update tables specified), CURVAL() does correctly return the disk value.
>>
>>Is there an official way to achieve this, or must I use REFRESH(), supressing the error?