>And I think that hiding a property defined in the parent class is equal to defining a >new property ..... by design ;-)

Yes, and that may be the main error of VFP regarding hidden properties. The VFPT has not foreseen that a property can change it's status regarding public,protected,hidden.

Another side point (this is pointed more to Fabio): When other languages have better oop style, if they interact with some database they simply send sql as strings to the DB servers. To the languages these are merely strings, no meaning. What about that? In foxpro you can directly use SQL within code and it will be checked for syntax errors at least. That's a big gap of .net, java and even smalltalk.

I've proposed a way to deal with the inability to have hidden properties working the way you need them by the interface class. You may define set- and get- procedures there and overload them in the special classes to also have public properties. Then you are even able to raise an error if a property is set or get that is meant to be protected or hidden. Why not? If you think of a foolproof framework you want to sell as a third party product: Even with working "hidden" properties the responsibility of the functionality is still at the hand of the developer.

Bye, Olaf.