Having puzzled myself for quite sometime I came to the conclusion that recordsets could be faster but the easiest way to send read only data to combo boxes, list boxes etc would be to convert the recordset to a cursor and deal with it the conventional way, instead of hardcoding hundreds of lines to get to the result. I must admit to losing the battle with xmltocursor() since the ado stream required in the command is not exactly a recordset object like orecordset but something else my limited 12 year experience and knowledge has been defeated from.

When I first started with this I thought I was going to be able to utilise all these fantastic activex controls like Microsoft's DBGrid FlexGrid etc but then I realised that these work fine in VB but not in VFP (at least thats the idea I got with this datasource binding adodc1 [olecontrol1 for me] mumble jumble).

Can someone shed some light since Im in the process of building a serious client server application with an ORACLE database sitting somewhere and a client application which myself and a team will develop in what we know best; Visual Foxpro.

ODBC connectivity doesn't sound sane or does it. Is ADO the solution to all my problems, or do I combine both based on what the application requires at the time.
Thanks to anyone that could spend some time for this. Since this is my first time here I promise I will contribute some of my knowledge as well on the system analysis aspect, if anyone needs me.

Christos Kyriacou