Default Admin account different from other [full access] accounts?

[Baloo]

It appears that Filemaker sees the default Admin account differently than all other accounts including those with the [Full Access] privilege set, and it slows things down by a couple of orders of magnitude.

As a test case I attempted a sort on an un-stored calculated column in a table with ~40K rows (this is not something I want/ need to do in my solution, it's just how I stumbled onto this and a good way to highlight the problem). When logged in as the default "Admin" user created by Filemaker, FMP sifts through roughly 300 records/ second. When logged in as a user with custom privileges that grant viewing access to all records and record by record editing it drops to 5 or 6 records per second. That makes sense as it needs to check each record in the set for privileges. However, when logged in as a user who has any of Filemaker's default privilege sets, which should apply to every field on every record from every table, and as such not need to check each one it only speeds up by 1 or 2 records per second. That includes the [Full Access] privilege set which should definitely function like the default Admin account. This is the same for accounts authenticated by Filemaker and by an external server. I first noticed the problem in Filemaker client Advanced 8.0v2 on a database hosted by Filemaker Server 8.0v2. Upgrading the client to 8.5v1 and the server to 8.0v4 did not fix the problem.

A local copy doesn't have quite as big of a discrepancy but does exhibit the same problem. (the default Admin sifts through ~1000 records /sec, all other FMP accounts/privilege sets including [Full Access] sift through ~ 200-300 records/ sec)

[Steven H. Blackwell]

Interesting. I have not heard of this behavior. Delete the default created Admin account and replace it with another [Full Access] Account and see what happens then.

Steven

[Baloo]

Thanks for the suggestion.

I deleted the Default Admin account and all other [Full Access] accounts functioned as before. I created a new testAdmin account with full access. It functioned like the others. I moved I to second in the list (just below the default Guest account) where the default Admin account had been. No change. I then created a new account, named it Admin and gave it [Full Access] it functioned like the default Admin account. So what ever it is FMP appears to be keying of the account name Admin and not some super secret piece of code it writes upon a files creation.

Here’s where things start to get bizarre. I then changed the “Admin” users privilege set to [Data Entry], then [Read Only] then to Custom record by record privileges. At each point I saw no discernable slow down in speed. It appears that FMP will sort un-indexed records faster for a user named “Admin” with record by record privileges than for a user named Test with [Full Access]

[Steven H. Blackwell]

Very odd. I will look into this and make some inquiries.

Steven

[Baloo]

DOH!!

First a mea culpa this is not a bug this is me being an idiot or rather spending entirely too much time looking at the problem from only one angle (one that assumes the mistake wasn’t mine). Going back to the field definition from the get go would have gotten me on the right track sooner (instead I had to spin my wheels for a while attempting to recreate the problem in a new file). In my own defense I thought I’d stripped out all of the Get(AccountName) checks in favor of the global admin flag a while ago (obviously I missed a few)

Here's an abbreviated definition of the field:

If( GroupID = _gGlobals::_gGroupID or Get ( AccountName ) = "Admin" or _gGlobals::_gAdmin = 1 ;

Case(several statements to display proper text)

;"" )

It was however not an entirely useless endeavor. It’s worth noting that as calculated above with each of my test accounts (LDAP or FMP) gAdmin was set to 1, but since it follows the record by record comparison in the logic all records are still checked, hence it’s slow. The interesting thing is that FMP does realize that the Get(AccountName) should be tested before anything else and does in fact test it first regardless of its order in the calculation.

Edited August 14, 2006 by Guest
field definition