Hi Rick, thanks for the reply.
>If the logic already exists on the server you might just modify the >logic to return you the data in XML format.
Do you mean the web application passing XML to the VFP function as parameters, or the VFP function returning XML to be picked-up by (or posted to) the web application?
>If this is done with something like PHP, this won't be automated but >rather than creating HTML you'd create HTML.
Did you mean XML as the last word of the sentence?
>If you can use a COM object on the server as Claude pointed out you can offload this XML generation to VFP quite easily. From VFP you can CursorToXML() or in VFP 8 the XMLAdpater to quite easily create the XML automatically from cursors. For objects you can use the free wwXML class (
http://www.west-wind.com/wwxml.asp) to convert the object to XML. In both cases you'd want to return the XML instead of the HTML result which could then be remotely accessed.
>
That sounds good. I've just taken a look at the article 'Building distributed applications with XML messaging' on your website and it has given me an insight into what's possible.
A couple of questions...
In one example you call the function XMLCursor using the command
lcXML = owwXML.LoadUrl(;
[https://www.west-wind.com/XMLCursor.wwd?Company=A])
Q. Does the resulting string have to be stored to a variable? Could a 'results file' (eg. a uniquely-named csv file) be created on the server that can then be 'picked-up' by a later URL request or another application?
Q. Why the .wwd extension? Could it equally be .dll or .exe? Should I be building my function as an .exe, single-threaded .dll or multi-threaded.dll?
>If tis is the only thing you need to do the above will be much easier than going through the process of creating and keeping a Web Service (especially a VFP based one) up to date. Otherwise creating a separate SOAP TOolkit based Web Service as Claude suggest may be an OK idea.
>
What benefits are there (if any) to creating a web-service over the method you suggest above?
Many thanks,
Alan
