David,

I am considering the possibility to use a Web service for collecting and/or sending various tables from/to client PCs to/from a central server. At the beginning it seemed to me very easy and flexible to use an xml string to pass the table to/from the server ( as an alternative to use an ftp method or using my own methods to parse the xml ...). But now i realize that what you get in terms of flexibility you loose it in performance ...

Thank you

>Dimitris,
>
>Do you really have to pass a 10.5 mb xml document around? Zipping the document would only serve to reduce the file transfer time, at the expense of time to zip it at the source and unzip it at the destination.
>
>Since the VFP XMLAdapter uses the MSXML DOM engine to read the XML it's going to be impossibly slow with a document of that size. IIRC correctly it's going to expand to 4-5 times the size of the document in memory, so it'll become a 42 mb document in memory.
>
>If the XML has a simple enough structure you can write your own code to parse it and load it into a cursor that would run much faster than the MSXML is going to process it.
>
>You might also want to look at developing a wrapper around a SAX implementation. SAX will be faster processing the document because it's not as complex as the MSXML DOM.
>
>>I am trying to get this xml file throu a web service i created with VFP. When I try to load the XML with the command:
>> loXMLAdapter.Tables.Item(1).ToCursor()
>>the PC stucks, so maybe it is a matter of loading time. But then if i want to pass big files like this one from a web service to a client, which method should i use? ( with web services am i limited to using xml to pass files between servers and clients?. Can i first zip the file and then return it from a function ?)