The 'Orthodox' way is to store all persistent data in the applications document. There are problems with doing this: Eg. You have an SDI application, with a control bar, nested in control bar is a custom list ctrl. Now from the list ctrl you need to display data stored in the document, this is where MFC becomes very messy. You do the following, 1/ Get the MainFrame (AfxGetMainWnd and cast to CMainFrame*) 2/ Get the ActiveDocment (GetActiveDocument and cast to CMyDoc) This completely sucks, however I have lived with this for 7 years. The other solution is a MVC (Model/View/Controller) pattern, Stingray have developed a class framework implementing MVC (unfortunately I haven't used this). MVC is a much OOD way of the DOC/View metaphor. Regards Norm