Process offline, publish with IWP

[RSGC]

Greetings. I am not sure this is the best location for this request. But here goes, maybe point me in the right direction if answers to this have been posted before. I have searched, but I suppose I don't even know what terms to search for. 

 

I have a FMP 11 DB that is published using IWP on 11 server. 

 

The DB is open to the public for browsing, but all edits are done by one or two people. For performance purposes, there is a bulk of data manipulations/calculations done when new data is entered. I know it is generally not good practice to store calculated values, but some reports need multiple passes through 10's of thousands of records up to 100 times time come up with the correct values. When you have lot of people running these reports at the same time, the server crawls at best. So we run one pass to do all the calculations, and then it runs well for the masses. 

 

The data entry and calculations are down with FMP installed locally, connecting to the to FMP Server hosted DB in a data center. That calculation process is pretty slow due to the remote connection, and amount of numbers to be crunched. What takes 5 minutes locally, can take 2 hours remotely. 

 

So, I am hoping there is a reasonable way to automate the process of updating/processing a fop db locally, and then pushing that complete and recalculated file to the FMP server, and have the FMP server start serving the updated data. 

 

The user doing the updates can be trained, but that person changes from time to time, and I would like to automate this as much as possible. 

 

The server is a windows server, and I have complete control of that, at the windows level. 

 

Suggestions welcome (other than rewrite the whole thing -- that is on the agenda, but even then I don't believe I can eliminate the pre-calculation of these values). 

 

Thanks,

 

Bob

[dansmith65]

I think the easiest way to accomplish what you want is to perform the "calculation process" script on the server. You would need to make the script server-compatible, then devise a way to trigger the script. You could run it every night on a set schedule, or you could allow your user or client side script trigger it to run on-demand via one of these techniques:

• http://www.1-more-thing.com/FMSDIFM.html
• http://www.skeletonkey.com/fmrpc/
• http://fmforums.com/forum/topic/82704-server-side-schedules-globals/#entry383783

[webko]

Another approach I've used for similar issues is to have two databases - the back-end with all the calcs and full operation, and then an import to a front-end database where all the fields are just text/number fields on a specified time frame.

 

Cheers

 

Webko