Bonnie,

That makes sense. I hadn't thought about other clients having trouble reading the DataSet. Making the data more accessible to them is part of what "Web Services" is all about.

Thanks.

>Joel,
>
>Nope, you're not dreaming ... you actually *can* have the WebService return a DataSet instead of the XML, but I recommend shying away from that practice for one main reason: If you do that, the WebService is then only useful to a .NET client. Any other client will not have a clue what to do with a .NET DataSet. Always returning an XML string solves that problem nicely.
>
>Now, that said, we're only *planning* on using .NET clients to access the WebServices ... but ya know, ya never know. <g> To me, it just makes more sense to send back a more generic XML string.
>
>~~Bonnie
>
>
>
>>Bonnie,
>>
>>I think that answers my question. I've experimented with ReadXML before to read in data from VFP's CursorToXML(), but I guess I was thinking (hoping) that .NET and SOAP would handle the XML conversions for DataSets automatically, like it does for simple types. In other words, you return a DataSet from your method, the client receives the result as a DataSet, and SOAP/.NET takes care of all the XML stuff in the middle. I've never tried that though, so I could be dreaming. <g>
>>
>>Thanks.