This seems slow to me

[Pat]

It took 5 minutes and 2 seconds to duplicate 187 records and increment the date by one day. Is this normal or is my computer slow or my scripting choices poor?

The script starts with one record which has the starting date. It gets duplicated 186 times, then the dates are entered in a loop:

go to first record

set variable [$$StartingDate; Date]

go to next record

loop

set field[Date;$$StartingDate + 1]

Go to next record(exit after last)

set variable[$$StartingDate; $$StartingDate +1]

End loop

I'm likely to have many more records and more complex loops, so if it takes this long on a more simple one, yikes!

Thanks for your thoughts and advice.

[IdealData]

There are 2 phases to your script

1. Duplicate

2. Update the dates

The duplicate may run slow because you have fields on the layout - you can use an empty layout so fields don't get displayed.

The date update could be replaced with the REPLACE FIELD CONTENTS step - however you will need the field to replace on the layout, so I suggest another layout with just the required field. Your existing loop would be very slow if there are fields on the layout.

Edited February 3, 2009 by Guest

[Pat]

Interesting. You are right, the duplication is a separate script and the speed on that is fine.

I just created a separate layout with just the date field on it, and it ran at 4:45, a marginal improvement. I would naturally like something much faster.

I had tried the replacement idea, and that took about as long.

Thanks for your response.

[Raybaudi]

Hi Pat

place a Freeze Window at the very first of the script.

[Jim Lah]

I have the same issue with Filemaker speed - particularly with creating new records. Generally I'm lucky if it will add 50-100 records per second (and that's if I keep the number of auto enter calculations down to a minimum). On a processor that is running at 5,000,000,000 operations per second that seems a tad slow. I know its doing other things but is there no other way to speed life up.

Yes, freezing windows and having no fields on a layout speeds up slightly - but I was expecting "click of a finger" types of speed rather than "have another cup of tea" speeds. Am I missing something?

Jim

[Søren Dyhr]

Pardon for my out of the box thinking, why is this necessary in the first place?

If it's for linking purposes only such as in a join table, that never ever would encounter being a part in a subsummary report, should multiline keying be examined - this can be accomplished via either repeating calc'fields or custom functions.

But extensive scripting as such ought to make you wonder if you have skipped a crucial step in the normalisation of the relational structure, such as ignoring the bare existence of relational operators beyond "equals" ... but perhaps you just need to study this:

http://www.nightwing.com.au/FileMaker/demos7/demo705.html

...or read this entire thread:

http://fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?tid/176396/tp/1/

...to establish if your your perhaps unique relational approach is the sole reason for that lenghty scripting?

--sd

[Jim Lah]

Søren

You are of course quite right - this is a much faster way to create a list of events or dates. My challenge is that I need records so that I can fill those records with other information and relate those records to other tables. Unless I am missing something I don't think there's a way of doing that with repetitions or lists of data unless new records are created.

Yet creating new records seems to take an age (or two).

Unless of course you know otherwise...

Jim