Hi Brian,

>While it's obvious that the modified must be in the 'after' section, a MSDN article led me to believe that only the key fields in the 'before' section were required for updating existing records. I was just trying to find a way to easily achieve it. You know, just being lazy again :) It's not a problem, especially since it works nicely (so far). I just figured it'd be nice to keep the XML as compact and efficient as possible.

I would really like to see an improved XMLUPDATEGRAM() function in the future, that would provide us with this and other possibilities.

>Ok, I'll try and play with memo fields today and let you know what I run into. I'm concerned about the binary fields though. I've been using the Northwind.employees (on SQL Server 2000) since it has both a memo (ntext) and image field. For reference, I'm passing SQL with the "FOR XML AUTO" clause via ADOCommand.Execute(), returning the result to an ADO Stream. If you want to see some code, let me know and I'll post it.

According to your and mine test results I think you won't be lucky regarding memos and image fields. Regarding your code ... yes, I would be very interested (thanks!). I'm currently not submitting the Updategrams directly to SQL Server, but I think I will do in some weeks or months (other priorities at the moment). But this will testing, etc.

>>If you would like to run the following code, I would be interested in the results on your machine (whether the memo field content is included or not):

>Results as follows:

Thanks for testing! The same as on my machine. I really don't know ... I noticed that the function didn't include memos and posted the quetsion here. Someone told me to set the KEyFieldList. I did that and it worked. Having a look at the generated updategrams some days later, the memo content wasn't there anymore! Probably the evaluation period of XMLUPDATEGRAM() timed out < vbg >.

Regards,
Armin