Hello,
A solution layout has many calculated fields including different
subtotals and sales taxes. For a document with many records this layout
is predictably slow to finish displaying.
Does anyone have a strategy for trapping stages of the refresh to use as
prompts to display progress bars? I'm just starting with this using a
progress bar set that came with some interface elements from Filemaker.
Watching the page refresh, I was able to see the order of some of the
slower fields. Tried making a calculated container field based on
IsEmpty for some of those fields; didn't work.
Any clues to this much appreciated.
Bill Jaynes


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 Bill Jaynes <bjaynes@cyberport.net> wrote:

> Hello,
> A solution layout has many calculated fields including different
> subtotals and sales taxes. For a document with many records this layout
> is predictably slow to finish displaying.
> Does anyone have a strategy for trapping stages of the refresh to use as
> prompts to display progress bars? I'm just starting with this using a
> progress bar set that came with some interface elements from Filemaker.
> Watching the page refresh, I was able to see the order of some of the
> slower fields. Tried making a calculated container field based on
> IsEmpty for some of those fields; didn't work.
> Any clues to this much appreciated.

Yeah. If I were you, I wouldn't do it. I've seen progress bars or
anything that overlays a screen cause the entire thing to start
redrawing every time the progress bar increments. ==:0 

Progress bars simply slow a display down even more. Instead, try out
some strategies to make the display faster, fast enough so that your
users don't need progress bars.

Look into processing behind the scenes setting complex calcs into
regular number fields with scripts. Some developers do this with update
routines at night, or if absolutely live data is required, with
interface which means that when invoices or sales orders are submitted,
the processing is done at that time, by scripts, not calc fields.

Doing this means totals, subtotals and subsummary displays are lightning
fast. Display of the reports or screens speeds up amazingly.  Even
preserving the calc fields, but displaying only regular number fields
into which the calc results are set by script is probably better than
trying to let subsummaries based on related field calcs display.

Or maybe I'm just getting too old to wait anymore while......the......
screeeeeeeennn.....reeeedrawwwwwwsssss.

Lynn Allen
www.semiotics.com
562.938.7890