I have looked into this and it is a bit more complicated as it seems. On SQL the UPPER solution will indeed make a find on a field with a case sensitive collating sequence case insensitive. The other way around is more difficult. How to make a search on a non-case sensitive collating sequence case sensitive? The only method for doing that is to pass a custom collating sequence to be used with the SQL query but then you have to find out what the matching collating sequence is and for a start DataFlex doesn't even know the collating sequence used right now.

It also turns out that on the embedded database if pbFullText is false it will also fail if the fields main index doesn't have the ignore case attribute set to the right value.

So maybe trying to override the case sensitivity setting at database level is the wrong way to go here. That however does not mean that the suggestionform doesn't need to know if it is working in a case sensitive fashion as the highlighting of the results and the comparisons on the embedded database should be done in the proper fashion. That would make this more of a documentation issue (advising to make sure to make it match the database setting).