Actually, after lots of testing, the entire exercise is in danger of grinding to a halt!
There is something about the way categories are made that I cannot emulate with my front-end form. It doesn't matter what data I send to the query, it isn't enough. I believe this is due to the way a category is saved in cmsb. The process does far more than send data to a database. The act of saving a category also sets, resets and updates a number of additional parameters - like lineage, globalOrder, breadcrumb, etc. The only way to execute this process is to open the category record in cmsb and then immediately save it.
Unless I'm mistaken, there is no way to replicate this process through a front-end form?
Perch