David,

>Thanks for the idea. The issue is that the end user does not have the skills to translate the files into XML, and they will be the ones telling the application which files to import.

Oh, sorry ... I guess I misunderstood ... I thought you might write a translation app to take care of that. But, anyway, as you already noted, you'll at least be able to use DataSets with Excel and CSV files, so that should help.

Good luck!

~~Bonnie



>Bonnie,
>
>Thanks for the idea. The issue is that the end user does not have the skills to translate the files into XML, and they will be the ones telling the application which files to import.
>
>That said, I think I can still take advantage of datasets by using the OleDB provider to read in Excel and CSV files. Then I've got the data in an objectified format (I currently seem to favor objects over relational data), and I think the transformations could actually be straightforward.
>
>
>Thanks for the thoughts.
>
>David
>
>>FWIW, if I were you, I'd just get the various file formats into XML and then use DataSets in your .NET application. That way you can utilize the DataSet.ReadXML() method. One reason I recommend this, is that it won't make any difference as to the order of the various columns because the .ReadXML() method will put them with the correct column in the DataTable.
>>
>>~~Bonnie