Conditional Formatting - does this parent row have any children?

[Mandu]

I have a table of around 25000 "Parents" and 11000 "Children". I want to display the Parents (or a foundset thereof) in a List view, each with an indicator (implemented by Conditional Formatting) of whether or not that Parent has any Children.

I placed on the body of the layout a related field Children::Name, and set Conditional Formatting for the field as follows:

Formula: Count(Children::Name) = 0

Format: set fill=red

When I display this layout in Browse mode, it renders VERY SLOWLY - row by row - and puts up a Find-in-progress message between each one. Each row takes about 5 seconds to add to the list. When displaying any significant number of parents, this becomes a real problem. Furthermore, I can find no way to interrupt this, even with User Abort enabled. I actually have to force-quit Filemaker.

Does anyone know what's going on? Am I using the right technique to do what I'm trying to do?

Thanks,

Chap

[mr_vodka]

Not sure what your issue is but you dont have to use Count (). If it is simply checking to see if it has a related child record(s), then a simple not IsEmpty (ChildTO::pkID) should be suffice.

What kind of relationship are you using to the child records?

[Mandu]

Not sure what your issue is but you dont have to use Count (). If it is simply checking to see if it has a related child record(s), then a simple not IsEmpty (ChildTO::pkID) should be suffice.

I believe that I also tried 'not IsEmpty(Child::Name)'.

What kind of relationship are you using to the child records?

Something like this: Parent::State = Child::State AND Parent::City = Child::City AND Parent::Zip = Child::Zip.

I'm unable to retrieve the layouts from the "broken" file so I can't remember exactly how I expressed the condition for the Conditional Formatting. But when I removed the field with the conditional formatting from the layout at one point, I didn't have the problem, leading me to suspect the problem lay in my condition.

Oh well, maybe I'll stumble upon it again some time.

[bruceR]

Why not just base the relation strictly on Zip?

[Mandu]

Why not just base the relation strictly on Zip?

I need to be more careful about my examples - that was a conceptual example rather than the actual one, which would have taken more time to explain. There are three independent fields which, taken together, comprise a unique key for the Parent table. My example was a poor one, since (as you point out) ZIP implies STATE+CITY.

I'm writing a metadata analyzer for databases in a school district. Each school district has multiple schools; each school has a database; each database has many tables, each table has many columns. I need SchoolID + TableName + ColumnName to uniquely identify a column in my domain.

But I'm not concerned about the design here; rather, about the odd performance hit I took with my formula for conditional formatting.