>- if ADO isn't a solution, are there besides the lowlevel filefunctions techniques that I could use to send over the data ? I'm thinking about routines that can convert a cursor into a single string and back ?

ADO is a good solution, but if you don't want to do it, there are a couple of alternatives:

Rick Strahl's wwIPStuff class has 2 very cool methods: EncodeDBF and DecodeDBF that take a table and convert it to a string for exactly the purpose you want it for.

If you need the data to be platform independent (like ADO) you can also build an XML document out of your data. Rick's wwXML class has methods to create an XML document from a table, and to create a table from an XML document. I have a methods on one of my servers that accept an SQL statement (very similar to what you are doing) and return an XML document. I have even created an auxiliary routine that generates an XSL stylesheet specificall for the said table that convetrs the XML into an HTML table that can be sorted by clicking on the column header.

On the client side, if you are going directly back to dbf, (it sounds like you are) then use the same XML class to convert the document back ot a table.

EncodeDBF is faster, but I like the XML solution because down the road, any client can use it.