>>>>As I think about it, I would not be surprised if I needed a separate sproc for each table and if I can't do the multiple table pull from one sproc - that maybe some strataframe jiggery pokery that is not native to .NET ???
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>>>>So basically the problem is that since I have to write the sprocs anyway, I don't want to have to manually write datasets or entity classes as well for each sproc.
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>>>I am not sure about your design time issue, but I will confirm that we return as many as 53 tables from a single sproc. We pass an array of table names to the DAL to create a usable DS. However we don't use VS to maintain our SQL code, we maintain our sprocs
>>>via SSMS.
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>>Thanks, Bruce. I'm fine with maintaining the sprocs from SSMS. The part I am confused about is how to see the structures of the tables in the dataset at design time. It is only an issue in that when designing the reports I think I need to be able to bind the report controls to members of the dataset and that would seem to mean I need to have the dataset available in the data explorer at design time. I tried pointing the date explorer at a sproc returning multiple tables but it only seems to see the first table and put its structure in the treeview. Do you know how I might get the structure of the multitable sproc to show up in the data explorer? I think I need them there in order to use them to design my reports.
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>Sorry, I'm not much help there. We do very little reporting out of our system, generally simple textual reports.
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>Could you use something like DataSet.WriteXML to create an xml file to use with the designer?

My problem is in finding a way to use the sproc to create the schema of the dataset. Once I have a dataset with the right schema at design time I can take it from there. I just find defining all those datasets to match my sprocs will be tedious and I am hoping to avoid it.