Hi Walter.

No matter with what I initialize the value, it sometimes changes. It changes from character to numeric or the other way arround. I've found that initializing it to character is the most reliable, however occasionally I find instances where it 'randomly' converts to numeric again. Now this is AFAIK only happening when you don't specify a controlsource.

As I said, I have never experienced this problem. You should come up with an example to reproduce this bug and send it to the VFP team. I am sure that, if they can reproduce it, they will be able to fix it.

and I do use them extensively in various situations. And therefore I do know there is a bug when it comes to keeping the same datatype in the combobox value property when the control is not bound to a property or field.

Please send me some code that reproduces this problem, then < s >. I, too, use combos (both bound and unbound) quite extensively in my applications and I have never run into the problem that you are describing. I would be interested in seeing it.

However this issue arises when not binding them at all and using the value property to get their status. For exampe a selection combobox at a form to filter a grid. If you don't bind it to a property on the form, you might experience this problem.

I do this sort of thing pretty frequently and, as I have already said, I have never experienced the problem that you are describing. Maybe I am just lucky < s >.

However most of my comboboxes are populated from an array property on my combobox baseclass.

When setting up the controlSource like this, it does not matter how the combo box is populated. One would very reasonably assume that if you are storing a foreign key in a table, it points to a description that is stored in some lookup table somewhere. Maybe I just took my stupid pills today, but I still do not see the problem.

So I use views which have also the meaningfull value, which populates the column and the integer field which populates the integer field. When you change the combobox value, the comobobox class automatically writes the displayvalue in the character meaningfull field.

I, too, have such a combo class. I use it when I must allow the users to add items to the combo in the grid on the fly. As I am sure you know, you cannot use the trick of setting up a conditional RowSOurce because that makes the column ReadOnly and that does not allow you to change the value in the DropDown Combo ( style = 0 ) that it contains < s >.