>I am working with a DLL created in VB and one of the parameters is a collection. I know it consist of 5 fields(strings)What Im wondering is when I call the Dll function would I drop the contents into a cursor and how would I return the contents after manipulating them. Is a collection the same as a cursor?

A collection is a property that contains a list of elements. Each element may be a simple data type, such as a string, or could be an object, with member properties, methods and collecions of it's own. VFP can traverse a collection using the FOR EACH syntax.

Let's assume we have an object named GroceryStore, instanced by the ProgID Grocery.Store. In a GroceryStore object, there is a property called StoreName that tells us which store to examine, a bunch of methods, and a collection called veggies, a colection of veggy objects. Each veggy object has properties Name, color, number_onhand and price. You can examine the veggies in your object by:

oStore = CREATEOBJ('Grocery.Store')
oStore.StoreName = "Ed's Fine Junk Foods"
FOR EACH veggy IN oStore.Veggies
   ? veggy.name, veggy.color, veggy.number_onhand, veggy.price
ENDFOR

You can have multile collections in an object; an object within a collection may be referencable by a name or it's instance number, a decision made by the person creating the object. There is no guarentee that any collection will contain any members, or a fixed limit on the number of members in collection (in most cases, the collection will have a Count property; in our case, oStore.Veggies.Count normally will tell you how many members it contains.) Each member of a collectwill be the same kind of thing; IOW, a collection of veggy objects would not also contain meat objects if meat objects behaved differently (different properties or methods.)