Kevin,

no, no ... I understood what you were saying, we're singing off the same page. Yes, we do that too ... that's *exactly* what the DataSet is for. It's a disconnected set of data. Ideally, you should minimize trips back to the server (of course there's always a trade-off with this ... you don't want to send back *too* much data in order to minimize the round-trips, but I think you know all this).

I'm curious how this other person advocates doing this differently? I don't see it ...

~~Bonnie



>Bonnie...
>
>Thanks for responding...however, in reading your response, it occured to me that I might not have completely described what we're doing. What I might not have been clear on is that we're passing the dataset all the way back to the Winform. Let me try this again...
>
>Let's say I'm a financial administrator, and it's my job to resolve financial deductions. The following happens:
>
>1) I sign on to the Winform, and I click a button that essentially says, 'retrieve all my new deductions.'
>
>2) That fires a call to the web service with a request to retrieve deductions for user XYZ.
>
>3) The Web Service calls a middle-tier component which either does SQL pass-through or calls a stored proc that retrieves the data from SQL Server.
>
>4) The middle-tier passes the dataset containing the data (might be 50 deductions) all the way back to the Winform.
>
>5) The winform binds the result set to a data grid, and the user scrolls through the list, reviews each one, and decides which one to edit. The user might also run a report on the deductions...since we've already pulled the dataset back, we can run crystal run-time locally without the need to go back to the server for anything.
>
>6) Any changes the user makes are packaged up as a simple data set, and sent back to the middle-tier [through the web service], which performs the update via a transaction manager as part of our data component.
>
>So yes, access to data is through a web service that in turn calls server-side components in C#. However, we're passing the dataset all the way back to the winform, to give the local UI the best performance.
>
>The person I talked to felt that it was better to NOT bring the dataset all the way back to the Winform. However, because of the UI requirements of our app, I just don't see that as practical...but maybe I'm missing something.
>
>Thanks,
>Kevin