On My "Sales Order" layout I decided to put the number of orders that had not been printed so that the people who were taking orders remembered to print them.

I did this by creating a new TO based on the "Sales Orders" Table called "Pending Orders" joined by a universal (X) Relationship. I then have two fields

PrintStatus = If ( IsEmpty ( SalesOrders PrintLog::Sales Order ID); "Not Printed"; "") // sets the print status to "Not Printed" if there are no entries for that order in the print log

and

CountNotPrinted = Count(Pending Orders::Print Status)

This works fine except the database performance has taken a big hit. I tried to make CountNotPrinted a global field. That improved the database performance but it only recalculates each time the file is reopened which in our case is only once per day. Is there a way to leave the field as a global but force it to be recalculated more often?

Thanks in advance

Your on the right track to create a separate table with records for tasks you want to accomplish, a global is only available to each user and the globals of the last user in are the only one stored.

when you create a task you simply create a record in another table with a time stamp and a status, and also the part its assigned to. You can display this data in a portal on in your solution where it makes sense and once items are complete you could via a multi predicate relationship have them disappear from the portal, instead of a "X" or Cartesian relationship, then its just a matter of counting the items in the portal.

once items are complete you could via a multi predicate relationship have them disappear from the portal,

Could you explain this a little more? namely how do I get FM to display in my portal only those records which have a certain "Status"