[FX.php List] Showing last related record - sort in FM or just PHP?

[DC]

hi joel,

since you have your testing architecture set up already i'd love it  
if you would take your testing one step further and enlighten us all  
about this issue since we all seem to be guessing and thumbnailing it  
and it would be cool to know exactly what the tradeoffs are when you  
give certain jobs to FMP:

speed comparison between an unstored calc field that plucks off the  
'last' record from a relationship and sending related records back  
through FX.php's XML processing. the test would have to be made with  
a range of different related record numbers starting at 1 related  
records and maybe going up to 1000.

my assumption is that unstored calc field will be slightly slower  
when there aren't too many related records, but with many related  
records, the overhead of processing them in WPE and XML will start to  
get slow.

my question is at what number of related records does the XML  
processing go slower than the unstored related calc field?

thanks!
dan

On Oct 17, 2006, at 4:22 PM, Joel Shapiro wrote:

> Thanks Dale
>
> I didn't know about end(), so that's great.
>
> In quick testing on my local development machine (running FMSA as  
> well as FMP and everything else), I couldn't see any real time  
> difference between FM's sending up to 1000 related records (just  
> for testing) sorted vs. unsorted -- for 4 parent records returned.  
> I had thought it'd be slower for FM to sort before sending, but it  
> seems negligible.  (And I will sort the relationship -- or even  
> just the portal(?) -- just to catch any out-of-order entries, as  
> Steve warned of.)
>
> Thanks all!
>
> -Joel
>
>
> On Oct 16, 2006, at 6:15 PM, Dale Bengston wrote:
>
>> Hi Joel,
>>
>> Well, if your relationship is sorted last-to-first, it will be  
>> element 0 of the related field array, so you can just reference  
>> that explicitly:
>>
>> 	echo $value['relationship::myField'][0];
>>
>> If your relationship is not sorted, you can easily find the last  
>> element with the PHP end function:
>>
>> 	echo end($value['relationship::myField']);
>>
>> I like to use PHP to do as much of the work as possible. No  
>> unstored calc fields necessary here.
>>
>> Dale
>>
>> On Oct 16, 2006, at 7:31 PM, Joel Shapiro wrote:
>>
>>> Great.  Thanks Steve!
>>>
>>> I'll plan on returning all related records (by default) and then  
>>> sorting in php to display only the one I want.
>>>
>>> Best,
>>> -Joel
>>>
>>>
>>> On Oct 16, 2006, at 5:16 PM, Steve Winter wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi Joel,
>>>>
>>>>>> my best advice, sort in fmp in the relationship definition.
>>>>>
>>>>> but if the WPE will spit back *all* related records regardless,
>>>>> wouldn't it be faster to have FM return all the data unsorted  
>>>>> and do
>>>>> the sorting within PHP?
>>>>
>>>> Probably... if you were actually going to do some form of sort,  
>>>> then it
>>>> would most likely be quicker to do it in php. If it was a sort  
>>>> order
>>>> applied to the relationship I don't think it will make any  
>>>> difference...
>>>>
>>>>>>  if you want to get really trick and you are sure you only ever
>>>>>> need one (most recent) record you can make a calc field that just
>>>>>> returns the last record. that way PHP doesn't have to transform a
>>>>>> bunch of XML data that you'll never use.
>>>>>
>>>>> I've heard it's optimal to not have calc fields on the web  
>>>>> layout if
>>>>> possible (for speed), but do you think that in this case it could
>>>>> still be faster than returning all related records?
>>>>
>>>> Personally I think this would be the slowest option... unstored
>>>> calculation  fields are going to be slower for the wpe to  
>>>> process than all
>>>> of the related records (IMHO)
>>>>
>>>> Cheers
>>>> Steve
>>>>
>>>>
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