Nigel,

You've just described a perfect situation for a "Web Service" hosted on a web server. Your app can make a SOAP call, passing parameters for what you want and receive in return a value (which could be a string with several rates included, or better, an XML document with the various rates). Or, your app could just ask for the individual rate you want or even pass in a value and specifics about which rates and receive back the converted value.

Look at Rick's SOAP/Web Service white papers at www.west-wind.com. Also, he has SOAP classes already built in to the later versions of Web Connection.


>I'm looking for suggestions to a problem I'm going to encounter shortly with one of my apps:
>
>The application is going to have a cashbook module added that will need to use multiple currencies and will need to regularly check the exchange rates.
>
>Ideally, I'd like the desktop app to request this info from a web site so that I have a central place to keep the exchange rates updated (similar to .NET but having a desktop app request the info instead of a website).
>
>Does anybody have any ideas? The best I can achieve so far is to have a file on the internet and use FTP to download this but thats a bit scrappy.