Ladies and Gentlemen,

I have isolated a quotation process that was embedded deep in a monolithic type application and created it as a VFP class that can now be compiled as a COM server.

I have the following requirements :-

1) I want to install it on a single NT server (with IIS available) on our LAN and have all internal users configured to be able to access this server from their workstations (via DCOM??) when they need a quotation from the server.

2) I wish to allow remote VFP clients to access this server over the Internet (via HTTP) utilising something like Web Connect or FoxISAPI.

3) The server must therefore function in an environment where remote users (via HTTP) and LAN based users can hit the same server simultaneously.

4) How do I get LAN users to be able to access the server? a) DCOM (don't know how to do this - yet) or b) Web Connect on our LAN (don't know how to do this either - yet <s>)

Finally, the original embedded process (before it was extracted) accepted a number of arrays (passed by reference) as parameters. This is a preferable way to pass the data into the server but I assume that this can't be done with a COM component. Bearing in mind that Web Connect could be in the equation, would saving the arrays to a memo field and passing an encoded DBF across the LAN or the Internet be acceptable, or a array -> string or even array -> XML ? Any advice on this ?

I know there are a number of questions here and I would very much appreciate your advice. What is very thrilling for me about this one is that the quotation programs are in a 2.6 application and I have created a wrapper COM component that drives these legacy programs from VFP and utilises some very nice features of VFP in all its glory. Its fantastic that VFP gives me this backward compatability. Wow, what a great tool VFP is <bg>.

Many thanks.