Avoiding "Summarizing Field..."

[SteveGriff]

Hi all,

I've done some reports in filemaker that rely heavily on Summary and Calculation fields. So much in fact that all the time now I get the "Summarizing field foobar..." all the time and it takes forever to calculate the fields.

Are there any way of minimising the amount of time it calculates these fields? Is there an option to calculate once and only when something is updated?

Thanks,

Steve Griff

[Ender]

When you have summary fields on a layout, FileMaker will work to evaluate them. This is usually the desired behavior; it calculates them as needed with the found set at the time of the report.

One thing you could do that would help is reduce the number of summary fields on the layout or work with a smaller found set.

Another approach is to use sum() and count() functions through a relationship. I don't know if doing it this way would make it perform better; it's still calculating on the fly.

[Ender]

Another idea is to precalculate subsets of the data and store it in regular number fields in a related file. Then summarize this data.

[DanBrill]

I had a similar problem when I had large sets of data for which I needed to calculate Z scores, which are a statistical thing that requires the calculation of the mean and the standard deviation of the data set. Because the summaries are unstored, they would calculate every time you scrolled between records when the field is on a layout.

So I switched to scripting the whole thing. When the script is run the necessary calculations were computed and then held in global variables. The globals were then used for the calculations. If the data changed, then the means and SDs held in the globals would be inaccurate. In this situation a little inaccuracy was tolerable. To make it accurate again, the user just had to click a "recalibrate" button which recalculated the mean and SD and saved these to the global fields.

By scripting it this way it made it avoided the constant recalculation which just wasn't feasible.

HTH,

Dan