Okay, to begin rebuilding my relatively large system (40+ files) I decided to start with the main hub of the system, the workorder file. So, wanting to separate my data from my front end, I made two copies of the file, one to be the front end and one to be the back end.

In the front end, I was able to repoint the layouts to look at the table in the back end instead of the local table by just changing the table occurence. So now, all my layouts are now updated to look at the back end file, and since the field names are the same, it all works great.

HOWEVER, when I deleted the local workorder table (didn't need it anymore!), it deleted all my fields off of my layouts even though they were now pointing to the new back end file. Even when I renamed a field in the local workorder table and then deleted it, it still deleted that field off the layout.

So I started over. The only workaround I found to fix this, and I tried this with a field that only showed on two layouts, was to open two windows of the file, put the layouts in layout mode, move something one pixel and then back, then delete the field in the local workorder table. It would delete it off the layout, but then when I exit the layout, I don't save the changes and voila, the field is back.

This is an okay workaround, but this file has 62 layouts! Can I even open 62 different windows of the same file? And this is too time consuming. Does anyone know of any way to keep this from happening?

Layouts are tied to TO's. When you deleted the table you may have deleted the TO that your layout was using. You are not going to be able to continue this method of creating new tables unless you want to 80+ files. I have copied layouts and then updated the fields.

No, note above that I mentioned that I changed my table occurence to read from the workorder table of the back end file. This of course in turn changed all the layouts to be tied to the new back end table instead of the local table. I renamed the backend file's table to Workorder_tbl so I could make sure that I would not get confused between the two.