Re: Loading form needs to much time

It is difficult to answer your question without knowing more about your application, but I will try. Please forgive me if I suggest something dumb.

You are correct when you say that forms is using this time to stack the canvases. If the form is running under Motif (the same is probably true for windows), it is building all of the controls for all of the canvases even though they are hidden. You would do well to evaluate your application and it all 17 canvases are not used frequently, you can split them up into separate forms.

Once you have divided them, instead of doing the block navigation and the show view built-in, make a call to Call_form. I recommend call_form over open_form, because you will achieve the same effect with call_form as with your stacked canvas. A call to call_form makes the called form modal and keeps the user from opening the same form multiple times until he crashes. Under motif this generally happens because the user will open the form and minimize it rather than closing it. A similar effect can occur under windows, but if your user has any intelligence, he may notice the minimized forms before he does himself any harm.

However, you've probably figured out from the previous paragraph there are some application specific problems that you may have with the above procedure Let me guess two:

1. The stacked canvases must communicate between one another. This can be overcome by using global variables. I know that the concept of globals make some object oriented programmers' skin crawl, but under forms it is a necessary evil. The globals allow you to communicate across the canvases.
2. It could cost you either in memory, or processing times if you have to populate some blocks when you raise the new form. You must decide if the trade off between the initial loading speed and delays that your user may face going to some if the less used canvases are worth it. If he uses three of the canvases 90% of the time, it may not bother him to wait a few seconds the other 10% of the time.

I hope that this helped, and the best of luck Allan

Sigrid Staudte <sstaudte_at_sachsenlb.de> wrote in message news:76edf8$21c$1_at_ernie.haupt.de...
>Hi,
>
>I have a form written with Oracle Forms 4.5, wich contains about 17
>stacked canvases. When I call the form, I have to wait more than half a
>minute until the form is completely shown on the screen. It seems that
>Forms needs this time to stacking all the canvases on the screen.
>
>Has anybody a good idea to speed up this?
>
>Thanks... Sigrid
Received on Sat Jan 02 1999 - 17:09:24 CET