Strange calculations when working remotely

[michele]

A customer of mine installed ADSL telephone lines to allow personel to work from home.

Everything runs fine and fast as usual but when opening some databases the database starts calculating (for example the date of today???) and that can take up to ten minutes.

They have a filemaker server and everything runs fine in the office.

What's happening?

Thankyou for reading and eventually answering my question.

Mich

[Kurt Knippel]

The "Today" function is a funny sort of stored function, which is kind of a hidden field in every record. If "Today" is used ANYWHERE in a file and that file is opened in Filemaker Pro client applicaion, then the Today field will be recalculated.

Opening the file in Filemaker Server will not affect this. Because of this I highly recommend the use of Status ( CurrentDate ) rather than Today, as it does not need to be recalculated.

P.S. This has nothing to do with the files being opened remotely or the ADSL, it is just a coincedience of which files he is opening.

[michele]

Thankyou, that's a good one to know about.

Mich

[danjacoby]

One other general note:

The "catch" with ADSL is the "A", which stands for "asynchronous". This means that the upload and download speeds are different. Specifically, it means that uploading speed is significantly slower.

In your case, it means that the upload from the server through the ADSL line is very slow, so anything that requires that a lot of data be sent is going to take a long time. This is one of the reasons why ADSL providers went bankrupt in droves over the past three years.

The way around this problem is to program the DB so that you don't have to send large amounts of data, which is why CaptKurt's solution works for you (and has the added benefit of being a better way to set things up, but that's beside the point).