My client is running an insurance sales website which invites users to complete a form which is then submitted, a premium calculated, and (hopefully) a sale made via a credit-card transaction. Up to now the premium calculation has been very straightforward (ie. a flat-rate monthly or annual fee), but the formula needs to be modified to take into account weighting factors such as age, health history, postcode, etc.. There is already a VFP function which takes these parameters and produces the required premium via. a complex set of remote views, but it is fast, and it works.

The question is, how can this function be called by the site and return a number of values, which could be in the form of properties of a single object or values in a single row of a cursor (eg. monthly premium, annual premium, underwriter commission, product expiry date, etc.)? I have visions of a self-contained .exe or COM object that can take the parameters and return the results in the form of a comma-delimited string to a file (perhaps as a .csv file, where the first line can have field descriptors) which can then be accessed by the scripting language (or maybe a stored procedure) and the required data extracted. Is this possible? Is there an easier solution? - I bet there is.

I am not familiar with the technology used with the site, but I think the back-end is SQL Server accessed by Perl scripts.

I guess using either an .exe or com object the VFP runtime libraries will have to be present on the server.

As you can probably gather, I am quite a novice regarding this subject at present, so any advice would be appreciated.

Alan