Mike,

>PMFJI. Does the cursor need to be created such that the field order is the same as in the XML file layout?

Assuming that you use VFP8 or higher and can, therefore, use the 8192 flag (append to existing cursor), you'll find that the mapping is not positional and is done strictly by XML tag name to VFP field name, as the following code demonstrates:

CREATE CURSOR mytest (test1 c(5), test2 c(5), test3 c(5))
INSERT INTO mytest VALUES ("test1", "test2", "test3")
BROWSE
CURSORTOXML("mytest", "mytest.xml",1,512)
MODI FILE mytest.xml NOMODIFY
USE IN mytest
CREATE CURSOR mytest (test2 c(5), test3 c(5), test4 c(5))
XMLTOCURSOR("mytest.xml","mytest", 512+8192)
BROWSE
USE IN mytest