>Like what?

Here's a thought. In my previous message, I told you i was planning on using a wrapper around my business object and that the BO had properties that correspond to columns in the table (call them "Field Column properties") ...something like:

bo.customer_ID
bo.customer_name
bo.customer_address

There are some real benefits doing this because now I can bind my form controls directly to the business object's "Field column" properties. I can also have _assign methods for each of these properties so that whenever a value is changed by the user, I can run some code - validation or whatever. All without directly accessing the fields or tables. Of course, this can all be accomplished in other ways, but it just seemed natural to think of my business object as though it is a table - even the syntax of BO.FieldName instead of Table.Fieldname. Even my Update and Insert methods of the BO are simplified because now, they just use the "field column" properties to get at the data and with the _assign method, I know which fields were changed by the user.

Now, since I've wrapped all this into a web service - assuming I could get at the properties :) - I could bind the form controls on the fat client directly to the properties of the web service object on the server.

The result is a fat client application that could be widely distributed over the internet or run locally on a lan - with very little adaptation. But the fact that I can't access the properties of the web server kills this.

Alan