Hi Rick, I'm having to send data from an inhouse server to the webconnection server. What's the best way to automate this (it has to be done every 5 minutes). There are about 28,000 records and the total size (including the dbc and individual dbf tables) is around 5 - 6 megabytes. Should I send JSON payloads or use some other method. I have to get the data to the webconnection server from the client's inhouse server. As always, thanks for your help.

For 5-6 megs of data JSON is probably fine. If it's much bigger you might want to send binary files as a Zip file:

• Run a query to export the data
• Package the dbf/fpt into a zip file
• Upload
• Unpack on the other end
• load the file
• Delete the temp files

While all that sounds complicated and slow it's actually pretty fast and likely much faster than serialization of a large data set.

The problems with JSON are:

• JSON bloats size so the size'll likely be 1.5x or more larger
• JSON exports fine, but for imports you have to provide the data structure in order to import back
• You need to use CollectionToCursor() to convert back

+++ Rick ---

Thanks Rick, appreciate the advice.