At 04:20 AM 17/12/2005 +0000, you wrote:

>What's the best way to handle lookup fields when performance over a
>remote connection is important?

Don't use live lookups! Use a tib_combobox and populate it once using a
tib_cursor. If you want to use the same lookups in different places, load
the data into a couple of TStringlists and just assign them to your lookup
controls as required.

If you need to refresh the controls (or your stringlists) during a session,
write a function to do all the stuff. You can use arguments to make your
function quite generic.

IMHO, live lookups are tres cool on desktops. They're tres cool on
networks too, for the first half-dozen times they're used. Most of the
time, they're just unnecessary noise. On slow networks they are totally
dispensible. IMHO, of course. I cringe sometimes at how developers
(Delphi developers especially) compromise the gee-whiz features of the
database engine in favour of the gee-whiz features they think their users
want to play with. I hold tight to the belief that UIs should be a
front-end to a database and against the belief that a database should be
the back-end to a UI.

My opinions about gee-whiz UIs are undoubtedly old-fashioned, yup. :-))

Helen