>Trouble is the original data to be shown in the grid won't necessarily be in record order, i.e. in an index order, so won't this have an inaccurate/meaningless row number in the grid? Not being 8-literate,. of course, I don't know what the Cast bit is doing though.

Indeed. That is why I did not add a RECNO() field to the original query which could come from several joined tables, and in any case you'd not be guaranteed a proper record number in the result. I did mention it is not a good design relying on record numbers. Inmy example to him I created a blank column, then filled it with recno() from the resulting cursor.

As for Cast() it's in VFP9, not 8. It was added to increase SQL Server compatibility. It allows you to define the type and size of the resulting column in the query itself. Among other things it fixes the kludgy method of saying '000 as MyNumber' to get a 3-digit numeric. Else you'd get whatever length the first record happens to be and truncated record since.

CAST is much cleaner. Another good reason to upgrade to VFP9!


I also realized I misquoted the VFP8 line. Should be

* in VFP8
Select f1,f2,00000 as rownumber from MyTable Into Cursor dummy readwrite

without the type definition. I guess I got used to using CAST()<g>



>>Depending on row number is generally not a good design. If you want to show it, then you could add a column to your controlling cursor:
>>

>>* in VFP9
>>Select f1,f2,Cast(0 as integer) as rownumber from MyTable Into Cursor dummy readwrite
>>* in VFP8
>>Select f1,f2,00000 as n(5,0) as rownumber from MyTable Into Cursor dummy readwrite
>>
>>* then
>>replace all rownumber with recno()
>>
>>* now go to show grid...
>>