I have written a function that imports data from another software's format into a .Net DataSet. I now am working on functions to be able to export this data into various different formats excel access fox etc. I have this working well within this particular application but figured this would be a nice class to put together.

The problem I am having is trying to make it a bit more generic so it would be a useful class. Because I have a "schema" file that describes the data I am importing it is fairly easy to export the data to oledb.

But when I just read and XML file using read XML how would I retrieve the "schema" about this data in order to create an oledb table using create table. For example below I have populated the max Columns.maxlength property while I was importing the data, all fields ar varchar.

'Populate Field Name
str = "Create Table " & tablename & " ("
For i = 0 To table.Columns.Count - 1
str = str & "[" & table.Columns(i).ColumnName & "] varchar(" & table.Columns(i).MaxLength & ") ,"
Next
str = Mid(str, 1, str.Length - 1) & ")"

So I end up with Create Table xx ([F1] varchar( 40)) etc.. Which is fine in my app but would not work as a generic class. So I guess what i need is a way to determine what type of data I have in a field and its length if it is a text field.

Thanks and ideas would be welcome.

Paul