Hi Rick,

Thanks for the input. In a case where a fat client app (VFP) runs SQL statements over the Internet which might return large data sets would you say then that the SQL over HTTP mechanism you provide in Web Connect & wwIPStuff is a better way to go than web services?

Thierry



>You cannot do this by default because VFP lacks the datatypes to return a binary stream in SafeArray format and properly type it that way. VFP lacks an array COM return type.
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>I haven't tried this but this should work: You can return the result using CREATEBINARY() (which creates a byte array). Set the return type to string, then change the WSDL and WSML file to return Bin.Hex data which will properly encode the binary string into Base64 (which BTW bloats too).
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>I would be very careful about this approach however because not all clients will be able to use this data automatically.
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>XML is a much better choice and if you're passing too much data back and forth that it's too slow you might want to reconsider how you are serving the data. If a Web Service sends back data that takes more than a second to convert into XML it's probably sending way too much data back for a distributed application.
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>+++ Rick ---
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