It's relatively easy to build a Web Service with VFP as long as the data you pass is passed as simple values like strings numbers etc. If you pass complex data it gets much more complex because the tools VFP and COM provide don't adequately support complex types like objects.

In your scenario the best solution is probably to pass a string of an XML encoded cursor (using CURSORTOXML() in VFP 8 and later) and you can use that to encode your FoxBase tables no problem.

But I think the big issue in your case is how to pass the data back and how the other end can consume the data. If you're using ASP Classic consuming a Web Service isn't trivial and even consuming the XML returned from CursorToXml in ASP is going to require manual parsing. But you can certainly pass the data back and then use the XMLDOM to parse the data.

Now, Web Connection 5 can certainly build this Web Service, but if that's all you want to do it's really overkill.

If all you need is this simple functionality you should use the SOAP Toolkit or even better if you have ASP.NET available to you ASP.NET Web Services with COM Interop. One of the advantages of ASP.NET over the SOAP Toolkit is that it's more flexible and allows you to create much richer type output than you can with other solutions. It's also currently supported by Microsoft which the SOAP Toolkit is not.

+++ Rick ---





>I need a small web service to allow a remote ASP site to obtain data from an employee database that is FoxBASE DOS dbf files. The remote site will only send me an ID, and web service would return one record with a dozen fields.
>
>How hard is it to build a web service?
>
>I had thought of using VFP 9 and the new West Wind 5.1. Is that a good idea?
>
>What about security with a web service? Could an outsider get into my FoxBASE data?
>
>
>Thank you,
>Joel