Speed Issue

[daveinc]

Hi folks,

I created an appointment book solution for a spa/salon that works well as is but is a little slow for their (and my) liking. There are 20 employees with various schedules. The appointments are booked in 15 minute increments and are added, removed, and adjusted constantly. I have used 20 portals to show each employees schedule on the screen with 5 portals showing at a time. Initially, this worked wonderfully as we used finds to seek out openings for particular services and/or employees. The calendar goes out 8 months into the future and you can imagine some of the finds taking quite a while (there are 56 15-minute blocks in a day * 20 employees * 8 months of 7-day weeks). We decided we needed a better way to search for openings so I created some portals that show the first open 15-minute block and how much time is available. This slowed the solution down some as many fields had to be set each time an appt was scheduled in order to keep the amount of open time current and correct for each opening throughout the day. Then we added the ability to book spa packages consisting of 2 to 7 distinct services in order using any available combination of employees who could provide those services. Many complicated relationships were required to create portals for each spa package showing available start times for the package with the ability to book the whole package with the click of a button. This part of the solution slowed us down some more as we had to set many number fields with our calculated values to make our portals work(can't use calcs on the right-hand side of relationships). Our file uses a separate record for each 15-minute block of time. We then use a self-join to determine the amount of time available in any contiguous set of 15-minute blocks that has not been used for appointments. This is what requires the resetting of various field values each time an appointment is made. Is there a better way to determine this amount of time available for each contiguous set of 15-minute blocks? Our solution works fairly well stand-alone or with FM Server(we tried it on a friends network) but we can't really afford (or find) FM 5 server and a separate new PC to run it on. Any suggestions or links to appointment book FM solutions that we can look at would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance. Dave