Thank you for your input, Craig. My app is in VFP6 so I will have to move it up to VFP8 to use XML. So I see it as double benefit: upgrading app to the latest version of VFP and change to n-tier design. The only downside in this approach is that I need to find time <g>


>There are two ways to do n-tier design. The first is logical, where each tier is separated, but all run on the same PC. The second is physical, where (typically) the UI runs on the desktop and the biz and data tiers run on servers.
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>If you do a proper design, you can get logical separation, which can then be moved to physical, if need be. However, under physical tiers, you cannon pass a cursor between tiers. IMO, XML is the way to go for data passing.
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>>I have a general question on designing 3-tier application. I am refactoring an application which is design a monolithic (as defined by Kevin McNeish).
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>>Would it be right approach (in general) to have cursors passed between UI tier and biz tier? That is, my plan is to create a cursor for every table that has to be updated. Then populate the cursors in the UI tier and pass them to BIZ tier and update data tables from the cursors. Does it make sense?
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>>TIA.