New problems of updating views involving inter-entity relationships or joins are identified, beyond those reported previously in the literature. A general purpose method and a set of algorithms are presented for correctly decomposing multilingual update requests on a network of distributed heterogeneous databases. The method and algorithm also apply to both homogeneous nondistributed and distributed database environments. The method, called prototype views and update rules, applies to individual relationships in an entity relationship (ER) view of the network database and gives a floorplan for update decomposition. The network database view represents a unified conceptual view of all the individual databases in the heterogeneous network (i.e. of the objects shared across the network). The update request is decomposed into a sequence of intermediate control language steps to subsequently guide the particular updates to each of the underlying databases in the network. Individual database updates are performed by each particular database management system (DBMS).>