Hi all,

I'm extensely using synchrous xml http calls from within a typical fat-client application. Example:

oXMLParser = CREATEOBJECT("Microsoft.XMLHTTP")
oXMLParser.OPEN("get","http://www.mysite/myres.xml",.F.) && sync. call
oXMLParser.SEND() && this line locks up

The whole thing is now working fine in production. Performance is fine except in one situation, "when the Internet is not available". A situation that tends to occurs quite often at customers' premises.

What happens then is the following: the .SEND() action locks the full process up until the "http timeout" is sent until an error is sent and caught by a VFP exception.

Until then the application looks "locked up", frozen in an error state for definitely a time period which is too long.

Any way to handle with that in a more graceful way without resorting to ASYNC calls? A safe API call that would check internet resource availabily beforehand for example?

Francois