>First, thanks to all who responed to my earlier question. My second question concerns indexing an encrypted field. Can I use the decrypt function when I create indexes in the table designer? If not, is it practical to create indexes on the fly to change the order of the data displayed in a grid? For example, I have three fields for patient name and one for SSN that will all be encrypted. When the user clicks on the header of any of the name columns, I want to display the patients in alphabetical order by name. If they click on the header for SSN, I want to display the patients in numerical order by SSN. Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks, Criss

Chris,

Slightly off subject here. I would limit the use of cipher to sensitive fields only, not all of them. If you need encryption for all your fields, I feel VFP is not appropriate for that. Take only this case: your server crashes while several users are in the middle of a transaction. What will get saved? The encrypted or unencrypted data, nobody knows. And the next time the users go to their record, the app might show them very strange characters! Frankly, I would limit the use of cipher to passwords and this sort of things.

But you have lots of other options. If you have your files on a file server like NT, you can give access rights to the users you want and no right to the others.

At your application level, you could draw a security scheme that would split your users into several categories and given the category they could (or not) have access to all menu items. At the form level, with only a few properties you could set flags to allow edit, delete and new to take place or not.

I've seen some frameworks where you can use containerized controls that will show up or not given the user level.

There is virtually no limit to your creativity.

José