Hi Dorris,

>I need to start boning up on consuming WebServices within a VFP executable. Would someone be so kind as to point me in the right direction? You can assume that I know what a web service is and that's about it.
>

There are a number of ways to go about it. Personally, I prefer wwSOAP (http://www.west-wind.com/wwSOAP.asp) because it is all native VFP code. VFP 7 used SOAP Toolkit 2.0, which wasn't very reliable, so I switched to wwSOAP. VFP now uses SOAP Toolkit 3.0 and is much better, but I decided to stick with wwSOAP. It is free, but also available with support as part of the West Wind Client Tools (http://www.west-wind.com/wwclientTools.asp).

If you prefer to stick with what is in the box, see "XML Web Services in Visual FoxPro" in the VFP Help file. There are also several articles/walkthroughs online by Microsoft and West Wind, so you can search for those. One lesser known feature added in VFP 8 is the "XML Web Service Builder" that "Makes it possible for you to bind an XML Web service to a control on a Visual FoxPro form or to an object, such as a cursor adapter in the form's data environment, without writing code." Unfortunately, the VFP documentation isn't much help on this topic, but if you are interested, you can find step-by-step instructions in Chapter 10 of What's New in VFP 8 book (http://www.hentzenwerke.com/catalog/wnvfp8.htm). Be aware that VFP uses SOAP Toolkit 3.0, which should work in most cases, but isn't really supported by Microsoft any longer.

Some web services can be very complex and more than the SOAP Toolkit and wwSOAP can handle. If you find yourself in that situation, you may have to turn to .NET. That's the article Mike Beane sent you (http://www.west-wind.com/presentations/foxdotnetwebservices/). The advantage of .NET is that you'll be using the latest web services technology and standards, but it is more difficult to set up than the above methods.