Hoping that someone can enlighten me on creating a progress bar for my database. Some searches take up to a min. and I would like the client to know that the search is progessing. Any help is appreciated.

Edit: Let me add that this is a XML /XSL database. I would like th eprogress bar to show in there web browser after performing the search and before the data is presented to them in the browser.

Thanks

Brad

Why is this posted in XML/XSL?

Try searching for: +Progress +Bar

this is posted in XML / XSL because that is how clients access my database.

I would try to find the reasons why the searches are so slow. We have pretty large DBs here and I brought my XML/XSLT searches down to less than 5 seconds even for complicated searches and large result sets.

Some hints to tune performance:

- do you use a DB converted from FM6 to FM7? Check for file references in FM7 that point to nowhere and delete them.

- do you have unindexed fields? Try to change your database so that they can be indexed.

- avoid fields that lookup calculated fields in self-join relations, according to my experience they slow down performance extremely.

- avoid multiple-field relations with a comparative operator like <, <=, >=, and >. They slow down performance with custom web publishing drastically.

- avoid field validation (more a subject with FMS7 - FM7Pro client communication).

- give as much memory to FM7S as possible.

- do you have sorts on large result sets? If you use -max=x in the query and try to sort with <xsl:sort ...> (see syntax here), you might get a performance increase because only x records must be sorted.

- the less fields on your web layout, the better the performance.

- within your XSLT/HTML, if possible avoid to nest too many <table>'s. The browser needs more time and usually waits until it can draw them (or use <colgroup><col/>...</colgroup> after <table> to give it a hint about your table structure.

- see this FAQ for best practice in XSLT and this Xalan-Java FAQ for performance considerations.

- If the search is still complicated, try to feed back the results to the web page in chunks, so that the user gets the feeling that something is going on.

Martin