thanx for the advice.  seems natural links are the way to go. 

hm, how difficult would it be to convert all my subforms from relational links to natural links? will i lose all the relationships between parent form and subform if i delete the existing subforms and recreate them w/ natural links?

all of it.

i tried copying layouts and copying records from one subform (w/ relational linking) to another (w/ natural links). it didn't work.

clues?

thanx

Quote:


No, that wouldn't work. If there is data that needs to be preserved, your best bet is likely to make use of the hierarchical export and import capabilities. Make a backup before doing any of this!

You do not need to alter any of your existing Forms, except for the Subform containers on the Parent Form.

1. From your top level Parent Form, export all the data, including all the data from all the subrecords. Just choose Set All in the Export Spec and accept the defaults.
2. Go into your design. Delete all the subforms from your Parent Form.
3. Using Field Manager, delete all the Subrecord fields from your Parent Database.
4. Go into the design of your Parent Form. Put all the Subforms back in, this time selecting Natural Linking.
5. Go into Preview and import the file you exported.

See how it goes. It is very important that you not change the order of any LE's until after you've imported the data. If you want some of your subrecords to be natural, and others to be relational, that will need to be dealt with in specific.

Your particular application structure is pretty complex, so it is difficult to predict how smoothly this will go. Give it a try and let me know how it works out.