Chris,

There are a number of ways to accomplish this depending on how you want to deal with the data once it arrives at the server.

Email and FTP let you 'deposit' the data on a server and then have it retrieved at a later point by some sort of polling mechanism. It's basically a messaging approach where the client application dumps data into a store of some sort (an email mailbox or an FTP directory for example) and another application/server polls and checks for these messages. The processing in this scenario is asynchronous and doesn't yield immediate results for the client. One big advantage of this scenario is that the server is a passive environment - ie. there's no code to run on the server, nothing to write to receive the data. All the logic can be driven and accessed from any Internet connection. The downside is that it requires some sort of polling by the recipient/server portion to check for new messages and managing possible synchronization and conflict resolution semantics.

Another approach is to use a Web Server application that can receive a request from the client via HTTP Upload or raw HTTP request. In that scenario both client and server are communicating in real time and your client can get a real time response back. Here the big advantage is that you can immediately get a result and see whether the request succeeded and receive a response or result that can be used on the client. It's a synchronous operation and typically this is more useful and easier to handle. The downside is that it requires code on the Web Server and you have to have a Web server and backend (ASP,ASP.NET with or without VFP backends) to handle the processing. Not a problem if you are already using a server backend, but usually a big deal if you don't.


The latter option tends to be easier to work with from a logistic perspective - it's the easiest way to create code for as well. But it's much more complicated to set up if you don't already have Web server and backend architecture in place.

Hope this helps,

+++ Rick ---


>Hi,
>
>I need to send a table (containing changes) to head office every time a user runs a batch update locally. I considered emailing but don't want the user to have the option of stopping the email as this would place the tables out of sync.
>
>Can anyone point me in the right direction. We have a website that we could upload the tables to but I wouldn't know where to start.
>
>TIA
>Chris