Limiting calculations to subsets

[cabbages]

Hey, there --

I'm using FMPro 5.5. We have a database used to manage our mouse colony with >70k records. My problem is, I've created a field to give a current age for each record in weeks [(Today-birthdate)/7]. Works fine, but the value is recalculated every morning the first time filemaker is open. And with 70,000 records, this takes a long time. (~15 minutes, according to the coworker who pointed this out to me.) How can I reduce this problem? I'd like to somehow limit the calculation to only those records where a certain field has a certain value. Something like "If 'alive?' equals 'Y', then (Today-birthdate)/7" but I have no idea what the language for that would be and I'm not entirely sure this would speed the process up.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[-Queue-]

Use Status(CurrentDate) instead of Today and make the calculation unstored in the Storage Options (Do not store calculation results).

You could do something like Case( IsEmpty(deathdate), (Status(CurrentDate) - birthdate)/7 ).

[cabbages]

Thank you! I'll try that.

One question about the deathdate case -- would that slow the calculations down again because the program would have to sort through date of death for all records?

[-Queue-]

It won't recalculate for all records unless you have all records found and are using a list view layout with the field on it. Unstored calculations only calculate when they or calculation that references them is on the current layout.

[cabbages]

Everything seems to be working great -- no 15 minutes to open the file of a morning. Thanks very much, Queue!