>Somnehow I've avoided this in the past but form A calls form B but form B does not know about any open dbf's that were available during form A. Even the alias was made public with a var called zdatbase to no avail.

Your choices for the called form are:

- it has a private datasession and handles opening/closing/settings for itself

- it uses the default datasession (i.e. whichever one was in effect when it got instantiated) and sees all the aliases and inherits the SETs.

Seems to be you wanted the #2, but did #1.