>Hmmm... pray tell. It's XML - and it should be flexible, which it is not.
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>It does not work correctly with SQL2000 schemas (see my post to Erik) and it doesn't work correctly with non-schema'd data because VFP guesses and guesses wrong most of the time for non-charcater data. As far as I can tell it doesn't use the SQL2000 schema at all and guesses at the data types.
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>This leaves the only working solution that the data is gen'd with CursorToXML() or like schema (which nothing else but possibly .Net beta 2 generates today).
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>Is this useful - yes, for some things like transferring data between VFP apps surely. It's fast and it's a good persistance format. But the lack of flexibilty of being able to provide some sort of schema in the form of a table that has the appropriate structure to read from makes it a lot less useful than it could have been...
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>The behavior that it exhibits now should be the exception not the rule. It can be highly useful to guess at incoming data types when you really don't know what the structure of hte data is. When you do however (and I'd say in most scenarios you do) then you can't take advantage of that fact. What this means is you'd have to do in imperfect import and then perform data type conversions on the imported data....
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>Attaching a schema to existing incoming data requires you to open the document and replace text or DOM access... that's not exactly an 'intuitive' solution wouldn't you say? And it would require you to use the exact schema the CursorToXML uses whcih again assumes the data was gen'd from CursorToXML().
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>My point is that there should be some flexibility in being able to override the structure behavior of XMLTOCURSOR(). As it is - it's very limited...

Please pardon my ignorance on this subject. In this context, does "schema" refer to the cursor data structure? If I always include an inline schema, will other applications be able to understand it and automatically convert it to a cursor (ADO or otherwise)? In other words, is there a standard for representing a cursor in XML?