Hi

I've tried all the suggestions in the FAQ for speeding things up.. my primary concern at the moment is the Scheduling view.. the others seem to be ok actually.

Do you have any other suggestions for speeding things up? We're sharing the calendar on our local network, and over a VPN to a remote office.. Macs and PCs together.. and it seems to be slower on a Mac.

Some ideas I have but I'm not sure how to go about it..

1. set the times displayed so it no longer has to calculate them? So like a row will always and only show 9am.. next row is 9:15am and so on.. no longer possible to scroll up or down the hours.
- additionally it still seems to default to 8:00am even tho I've got it set to start the day at 9:00am
- we really only need 9am-6pm.. but 9am-8pm might be good to have on rare occasions

or

2. remove the time bar on the left altogether.. and put the times into the appointment bubbles? all we would need to see are the start time, and the name of the person for whom the appointment is for

3. any other ideas?

It would be best if we could keep it in the 11 hour view.. and we're looking at the Scheduling view to be our main method for scheduling.. we need to be able to see what's happening at both offices when scheduling appointments.

Thanks

Don't mean to be a pessimist, but I wouldn't expect the scheduling tab, let alone the 11 hours scale, to be quick over a VPN.

That said, there are things you can do. I don't think that focusing on the hours display is the way, however. That time display is one of the lightest (fastest) parts of the scheduling display. (You can check this out by duplicating the layout, deleting all those time fields, and then checking it out in browse mode over the VPN.)

If you're into something radical, you could try the following...

• remove the ApptDisplayonScheduleTrimmedCalc (repetition 2; the long one) from each of the 5 resource columns

• replace repetition 1 (the one line version of ApptDisplayonScheduleTrimmedCalc at the top of the columns) with the ApptTitle field.

... that will speed things up about as much as they can be. You'd need to click on the appt to see anything but the title. If you're using FileMaker 8, you *could* add the remainder of the description, or whatever else you'd like to see, to a tool tip that displays when you roll over the appointment. Since tool tips wrap on their own, you'd be skipping all the custom functions we use to hard wrap each appointment's description. You'd have to test it over *your* VPN, but it could be good.

Of course switching to the 7 hour scale, instead of the 11 hour, is a reliable way to speed things up; that scale does much less work than the 11 hour version as it is calculating fewer records. You could also reduce the number of columns from 5 to 4 or 3, but that starts reducing the usefulness of things.

If you try the tool tip trick, let us know how it works.

Hope that helps,

John

I was only focusing on the hours on the left because it seems to be the only thing left i can chop off : P

My boss was even thinking about taking out the different colors shown for different appointments.

Thanks for the suggestions... back to the drawing board.

po0t wrote:I was only focusing on the hours on the left because it seems to be the only thing left i can chop off : P

I know the feeling. =)

I just wanted to say that the tip of removing the trimmed title and replacing it with the text title field was incredible for me. Most (well, all) of our titles are about 3 words long anyway, so I'm going to do the tooltip method for the other info in the appointment with a custom function I think, and I think we'll be golden.

Thanks!

Hi Po0t,

This subject interest me.

It is okay if you can share with us the speed you are running over the VPN? And how slow is the 'slow' as compared to running from the desktop ?

Thanks

Well..

Based on a simple test I did.. our upload from each office is about 100-110KB/s Both are on the same ISP under the same service package.. we're on cable. One office is in Vancouver, the other's in Burnaby.. that's like 13km or something.

I haven't had much opportunity myself to test speeds on all the computers in Vancouver, but my boss works out of there so he's been giving me feedback.

note: I've made a bunch of changes to the views to speed them up.. and to accomodate two offices.

On my work computer in Burnaby(3GHz 1gb DDR XP Pro), loading up different views in the Calendar takes 2 seconds max on any given layout. Seems about 1-2 seconds longer from a 1.7GHz running Server2003. From an iMac G4 about 4 seconds max for any given layout.

Now my boss is testing from his laptop(a 2-3yr old Dell running XP Pro) in Vancouver.. it takes around 10-20 seconds to load different views or to create appointments. But otherwise our filemaker database seems to be working fine.. it's only in the CC Calendar that things seem to get slow.

I think I've done about all I can to speed up the Scheduling view.. so for our next step, it looks like we'll be moving up to a faster ISP.. maan i hope that does it for us.

I just wanted to say that the tip of removing the trimmed title and replacing it with the text title field was incredible for me.

Laura Bowyer, of SolutionMakers, and I were playing around with this yesterday and came up with a way to take this modification further.

If you remove the 2nd repetition of ApptDisplayonScheduleTrimmedCalc as suggested above, you can also remove the second portal to HoursScheduleView.*

With that portal removed you can turn on the scroll bar for the remaining schedule portal and scroll the whole scheduling view, hours and all. Of course this portal has no border color so you'll want to give it a border color and then turn the line weight for the portal to 0. This shows just the scroll bar, without showing the lines between portal records.

In FileMaker 8, you'll also want to make sure the portal option "Reset Scroll Bars when Exiting Record" in unchecked.

This modification will allow many people to bypass the slower thin (11 hour) scale all together; especially since FileMaker 8 supports scrolling portals with the scroll wheel on your mouse. This makes it very easy to review the whole day, even on the 7 hour (thick) scale.

Very slick trick.

* There are only 2 portals on the scheduling tab; the second one is offset one row from the first and is "on top" of it. Once you've deleted the 5 instances of the 2nd repetitions of ApptDisplayonScheduleTrimmedCalc, clicking right about in the center of the screen will select this second, now unnecessary portal.

Hi there,

I adjusted the kalender so people can scroll with the mouse wheel. This causes a problem. The lines are getting messy when scrolling. I mean the lines which help you see the half our/kwarter etc.

Is there a fix or do I need to remove the lines.

Kind regards,

Willem-Jan Kempen

You need to remove the lines: FileMaker doesn't like scrolling "over" things.

You can turn on the portal borders to use the portal rows themselves as lines... I don't like the way that looks, though, as they don't really line up with the graphics.

If you experiment, however, I believe you can put a line "in" the first portal row at so that it lines up with the bubble graphics AND scrolls with the portal (since it is completely inside the portal row).

Hi John,

Thanks for your help. Dissecting layout is not my favorite work. I found out it is easy to remove the linesgrafic when making the portal smaller and picking the grafic from the right of it. For the next one who is trying the scroll thing.

Kind regards,

Willem-Jan