Bonnie,

>>Well, since I don't know which MSDN sample you are referring to, I don't know what issues you might be talking about. There is certainly nothing wrong with a Web Service returning a DataSet with one table or 100 tables. BTW, you will get mixed opinions on whether it's a good idea to have your Web Service deal with DataSets or XML (using a the DataSet.GetXml() method). I prefer to use XML.

This is the link to the walkthrough I was referring to: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/vsintro7/html/vbwlkCreatingDistributedWebApplicationWalkthrough.asp

>>The way you've just described it, you are filling the DataSet with all the records from all the tables and just filtering them locally. With the amount of data that you are pulling down, this is probably not what you want to do.

Great! That explains a lot! So now I know what was wrong with it... thanx 8 )

>>No. Now you've totally lost me. How can you have a DataAdapter.Fill(ds) in the UI if you're using a Web Service? The DataAdapter belongs server-side, not client-side.

Ha! Ha! Ha! My bad! I meant that I was calling the .GetData() which fills the dataset. Thinking much about it... it is wrong because I was not using a parameter to specify which records to pull. I was dependent on the relationship object for filtering the data to be returned which is clearly not the right way! Silly me!!! Thanx! for charging up my brain cells on this.

>>No, you don't need to do anything to the client apps assuming that you don't break the interface of the Web Service methods. By that I mean that if your UI is calling a Web Service method that expects to have 3 parameters, you can't change that Web Service method to use 4 parameters. That breaks the interface. Once you do that, you would have to change your UI.

That's good to know... I think. Assuming that I have gotten all the necessary data I need for this. But then again... nobody's perfect 8 )

Thanx! a lot for these discussions. I really enjoyed it! I highly appreciate that you've taken sometime to help me out. If I were just in the nieghborhood, I'd take you out to lunch to show my gratitude 8 )

Regards,

Martin