self join portal issues creating pages

[wngiii]

Greetings,

I'm trying to beef up my current solution and can't seem to figure a good way to do it. currently I've got a Database hosted on server advanced where people access it through IWP. I have a results layout with a self-join relationship that shows the results of any search in that portal. The user then just clicks on the portal and it takes them to a details page for that record. This works great for searches but when I want the user to see all the records (5000+) it takes such a drain on the server to populate the entire list that it takes for ever and most people will want to view all when they first get in. I'm thinking of having it filter and create pages, but I can't seem to get the relationship to do that and I can't come up with a good solution.

Anyway, any thoughts, suggestions, alternative ways to do it would be helpful or even a better way to create the results in a portal would be great. Below is the set up:

Albums table: 5000+ records with the main key being the catalog code field

A combination of custom function and script that lists the catalog codes in a global field

A self join relationship of that global field to the catalog code field (this creates the search results in the portal)

So when I "show all" in the portal it has to run the script/custom function and then show the results in the portal. all through IWP which takes for ever...

Thanks in advance for any help!

Bill

[bruceR]

Why do any of this? Why use a portal? You have a found set, what's wrong with that?

[wngiii]

Why not do it? It is mainly for ease of use for the people using the database. since it is online I want it to actually act like a website. And if I had the time and web development skills I would just use the Custom web publishing, but I don't.

I don't like being limited to the 25 records in list view or 50 records in Table view. my least favorite option is to switch to table view but in that case you can't run any buttons or scripts (that I'm aware of) to jump to a detail layout. Plus it's a pain and confusing to the users when in table view and you click on a field it automatically moves it up to the top.

Basically I'm trying to make the USER experience as simple as possible.

[Vaughan]

Be careful, returning more than 25/50 records can reduce the server performance to a crawl, especially if there are a few users hitting the server at the same time.

[bruceR]

Why not do it?

But you've already answered that.

It doesn't work.

It isn't an appropriate solution for IWP.

That said, there are "paged portal" techniques that let you use a small row-count portal kind of like a sliding window over a found set. You do NOT need to process the entire found set. You just need to decide how many rows your window will be.

Edited June 11, 2010 by Guest