Hi Thomas. Yes I have already considered most of your points. I was really wondering if there were specific things to test for iro hyperlinks to subsequent pages but I think I have a pretty good grip on it.

Thanks


>Jos,
>certainly doable in vfp.
>Think more about scalabilty, expected amout of change,
>bandwidth, expected download volume, user know how to decide on your approach.
>
>IE-based spidering is very easy if you have to decide on certain paths/patterns
>or often changing side, since it is nearly "visual" programming.
>IE parsing is nice, but is slower than direct string work
>(but most of the time the bottleneck is receiving the data)
>
>pure brute force attacks on a (rather) small line should be done via
>WinInet(wrapper) - see westwind, afp and some other libraries.
>There used to be also MSDN article, and there is UrlDownloadToFile()...
>
>One thing: since vfp is single threaded, a threaded approach,
>which might be sensible in some use cases, is rather difficult.
>This would be reason for me to jump to .net, even if really like the
>fox - they have some nice classes there in fine granularity.
>
>One other thing: Hope you are using a late vfp version:
>I started doing this in vfp5 and IE4:
>hell in large doses, so I switched over to vb and saving
>via vfp.com. No inheritance, but I was able to work with a few
>simple strategy patterns. Later on vfp6 I revisited the project
>(much more doable without vb <g>) but since it was working,
>I left it in vb. Would have been a near toss up for a new project.
>
>With vfp8 I won't think about vb (but at least consider .net)
>
>my 0.02 EUR
>
>thomas