How to Use the Caption Field Property (130240)

SUMMARY

You can specify a caption property for a field when creating or altering a table using the Visual FoxPro database container, or a program can do it by using the CREATE TABLE and ALTER TABLE commands. This article describes how and where the caption property is used within Visual FoxPro.

MORE INFORMATION

A caption property is used to customize the display of a field on Browse windows, Forms, and Reports within a Visual FoxPro application. The caption is typically a text string that describes the field. For example, if a field name in a table is SSN, you might want to give the field a caption of "Social Security Number."

The caption property for a field can be used in these scenarios:

In a Browse window as the column header.
By the Form Wizard to describe a field.
By the Report Wizard to describe a field or as a column header.
By the Label Wizard to describe a field.

NOTE: The caption property is not used by the Visual FoxPro builders and is not used by the Query Wizard.

Using the above example, if you browse the table containing the SSN field, the column header for SSN will read Social Security Number. If you used the same table to create a form by using the Form Wizard, the SSN field would be preceded with the description of Social Security Number.

To reference a field's caption in a program, use the DBGETPROP() function. For example, if the SSN field is stored in a table named Customer, you could use the following code to assign the caption to the variable cGetCap:

   cGetCap = DBGETPROP('customer.ssn', 'FIELD', 'CAPTION')