Hi Neil, Thanks very much for your detailed reply. I really appreciate your input. I'm freelance and use to work for MF support many many years ago! The cobol system is in-house for my client though used at many sites. Like yours there's a 30 year history! We switched to dialog a decade or so ago and I didn't have time to work out how to do everything plus OO was new to me. Currently doing a big redevelopment and i wanted to rationalise. I'm using the latest visual studio and visual cobol in windows. The debug facilities are really good but really hindered by complex dialog with events flying off all over the place (you know what i mean i'm sure). Ideally we'll move away from dialog but meanwhile i just want to get control over it all from programs. In an ideal world I'd have absolute minimum dialog code itself. Also I hate doing things by rote and so really wanted to understand how it all works behind the scenes e.g. with dialog listview objects and the like, so that i can properly centralise db/dialog-interface/error-trapping etc rather than have it hard-coded all over the place as tends to be the result of thirty years of development! Getting the dialog into the progs is the last piece of the gaining-control jigsaw for now. I'm also switching from MF files to MySQL so again have better control over the data. MF indexed files are superfast but like dialog, a mare to debug. All the best to you anyway, Regards, Linden
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