Playing Peek-a-boo with Preview

September 10, 200619 yr

I am Previewing an Invoice-LineItem layout that is based on a List View of the LineItems table, and uses subsummary parts (breaking on Invoice ID) to print the top and bottom portions of the Invoice.

Usually it works: more often than not, as I page through the previewed page images, everything looks right. Every now and then, however, I come to an Invoice where none (or almost none) of the fields are filled in.

Here's the kicker: if I page forward, and then page back to the blank invoice, usually it's properly filled in. It's as if FM Preview mode displayed the record before it was able to chase down the related fields, but eventually caught up.

And then, sometimes, if I page backward I'll see a valueless invoice that was properly filled in just moments before.

There's nothing consistent about any of it.

I just tried printing the report to a PDF file. Browing through that, everything appears to be properly filled in. Okay, so maybe it's a synchronization bug in the Preview processing? Has anyone seen anything like this?

Thanks,

Chap

September 11, 200619 yr

Hi Chap,

I've not seen the preview problem you're describing. What hardware are you running on? Are you seeing this on more than one computer?

If I were you I would play around with the graphics and video settings to see if that changes the behavior - it sounds like it could even be a screen rendering or memory/caching issue.

September 11, 200619 yr

Author

Hi Chap,
I've not seen the preview problem you're describing. What hardware are you running on? Are you seeing this on more than one computer?

If I were you I would play around with the graphics and video settings to see if that changes the behavior - it sounds like it could even be a screen rendering or memory/caching issue.

I'm running on a Powerbook G4, 867MHz, 1G RAM. Mac OS X 10.4.7. FM's File Cache is maxxed at 32M. Have not tried it on any other computer.

Things were really lugging. Each time I paged forward to the next Preview page, the window would repaint piece-meal, and sometimes the data field displays would be blank, as mentioned. Printing (including saving as PDF) worked dependably.

Today, however, things are much snappier all around, windows repaint in a single "blink", and I'm not seeing blank pages. I agree, it sounds like there was some low-resource condition at work. If it happens again I'll try messing with settings, killing unrelated processes, etc.