I figured it out. I rewrote the RunQuery code to return a DataSet.



>Ok, I'm still confused on something here.
>
>I wrote a method called RunQuery that accepts a query string and returns a DataReader. I then wrote a method
>called Login which returns the user's Guid as a string.
>
>Now I'm working on a GetUser method in which I want to return the user's record as XML:
>
>

>        public void GetUser(string sGuid, ref string sMessage)
>        {
>
>            // Clear the message string
>            sMessage = "";
>
>            // Define variables
>            SqlDataReader oReader = null;
>            string sQuery = "select * from appusers where usr_guid = '" + sGuid + "'";
>            string sRetVal = "";
>
>            // Call the method to run the query
>            oReader = RunQuery(sQuery, ref sMessage);
>
>            // If any data was returned and no error occured...
>            if (oReader != null && oReader.HasRows && sMessage == "")
>            {
>
>                // Convert the data to XML
>                                                        // <----- What goes here?
>
>                // Close the reader
>                oReader.Close();
>
>            }
>
>        }
>
>

>
>
>
>
>
>
>>>>Seriously, all our web service methods have a "ref string Message" parameter that will contain any error messages that the server-side stuff may have encountered.
>>>
>>>That was the reason I thought of returning an object. An object would contain any amount of data. But I can
>>>see how it would be cumbersome to return an object.
>>
>>There are other issues with returning objects ... they may not be recognized by other platforms that may use the Web Service. A few of our customers access some web services from other platforms and we wanted to be sure to maintain platform independence. That's why we return data as a string that's simply the XML representation of the data (MyDataSet.GetXml(), as I already mentioned).
>>
>>~~Bonnie