I find returning a ADO.NET generated XML string work much better. As long as the calling application is fully XML supported, it can read the data into whatever storage format they use. No manual parsing at all.

Stephen


>It is returning xml. Just a single item.

>Joe.

>>OK, so your WebService is just returning a string, correct? Normally I'd say that optimally a WebService should return XML, but in this case, since they are only returning a single string, XML may be overkill. I don't know what the "best practices" would be in this case, but it seems to me that it's simple enough to just leave it at returning a simple string.
>>
>>Maybe someone else can jump in with some other ideas ...
>>
>>~~Bonnie