Progress Bar

[brad2610]

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

[Ender]

Why is this posted in XML/XSL?

Try searching for: +Progress +Bar

[brad2610]

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

[Martin Brändle]

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