Hi John,

>Before using winsock, make sure your target system vendor does not have a dll or other wrapper that allows you to send/receive files or strings without having to write your own comms. Some now allow you to drop messages into a folder and receive responses the same way.

Are you waying that this way is easier or less troublesome than with Winsock ? I'd like to know the most solid and fast to handle the HL7 protocol.

>FWIW, VFP is an excellent HL7 parser/messenger. Textmerge and DELIMITED make it much easier than trying to pick apart variable-width messages manually. Because there are variants of HL7, we load message type parameters (eg differences in headers/patient segments) into lookup tables and process multiple formats, even different field orders, using EVAL().

Different variants of HL7 or different levels of communicating ?

>The biggest issue is error handling- you need to ensure that every message has all the necessary segments and values to allow you to process safely.

I assume that you'll get an error string returned when you trying to send an invalid string. Are there any more gotcha's to take care of ?

Thanks,

Walter,