Hi Barry,

What I am looking to do is to populate the metadata for a UI based on a Virtual Table from the underlying table attributes. From the developer perspective, a view has the fields I tell it to have: it's never a question. And I understand that from the data engine perspective, the fields can change at any time.

In VFP, even the field order of the underlying table had to stay the same, as the mapping was set that way in the remote view DBC. That was a mess. Change the underlying field order and the DBC view had to be rebuilt. That really slowed down development.

What I was asking, therefore, was is there a way to know the table.field on which a VT is based, that in turn based on the last time the VT ran of course. Almost every time I ask this kind of question I find out that yes, there is yet another aspect of the Lianja infrastructure which has been there for years but hasn't been exposed yet. I am no longer surprised. This information was known to the data engine when it ran the view the last time: is there a way to "get" that mapping information the engine knew at that moment?

One Use Case would be to populate UI attributes for a VT based on the table attributes of an underlying Lianja table. Another Use Case would be mapping existing VT columns when reverse-engineering into an application that manages all aspects of attributes and metadata for an application: that's for when I get time, and tempus has been fugitting at the speed of light, it seems. But some day. I don't have any emergencies this weekend, so perhaps between doing dishes and laundry something will get done. I actually like doing normal things in life, like those things or fixing the lawn mower, etc., as a reminder that I don't just live in the tech world.

Hank