>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

Jose,

The problem here is not so much limiting access to the data for authorized users as it is prohibiting access outside the application. FoxPro tables are easily read by other application (e.g. Excel) and that is what we are trying to prevent. A suggestion was given to me this morning about separating sensitive data out of the main Patient table and linking to it. So I would have a PatientName table, a PatientSSN table and a PatientDemographics table and none of the sensitive data is connected to anything but a key. Might be my best option if I can't encrypt this data. Thanks for the ideas.

Criss