I use the cursortoxml() to handle a really long list of either member numbers or other numbers that would get truncated if I did not. The RstoCursor I thought about using because what is returned from the stored procedure must be a usable cursor to report on. If I am making this way to complicated I would not be suprised (I am rather new to ado). My main goal was to be able to present at our department meeting a list of methods to connect and retrieve data (for reporting - for now) for our department to set as a standard for moving our VFP applications to a SQL Server backend. If ODBC is the easiest way to go and there is very little difference that is just fine, but I have to be complete in my analysis.

thanks again
Kelly