inherited properties

[bginhb]

I acquired a telephone list from a friend. The phone # field had been established using an input format with the special characters stored in the mask ( I found out later, and I began designing a form around the table. It then became obvious that the formatting that included the special characters was a problem as search criteria would also have to include the special characters.

So I wrote a bit of code to remove the special characters and that worked fine except that now I can't get the (view) formatting to show the special characters even when using a mask and I don't remember ever having this problem before. A primary form runs a query that displays a subset of records from the underlying table and displays them in a listbox for subsequent User selection of the item they want and all is fine except that the listbox row will only show the stored numbers and the formatting is ignored. While this is a good entry approach it's not a good display approach.

Is that what I should expect or have I done something improper? Is it an inheritance problem?



Appreciate any help,
bginhb

[June7]

Beilieve is partially inheritance issue. Controls already built on forms and reports will not reflect changes to field properties in table. The table field properties are adopted by controls only when first created from the field list. However, list/combobox will not use the Format or InputMask properties. Try this as RowSource to show phone number with characters:

SELECT Format([phone], "(000) 000-0000") As PhoneNum FROM table;