I was addressing this comment about sending a file to Robert, but I need to apologize to Bruce, as he had already followed exactly these steps back in March, and I had forgotten about that. But I went thru my records and found that I had indeed downloaded the file he sent me back in March. I’m not sure how much time I spent on it at that time.
I wasn’t able to exactly duplicate the problem based on Bruce’s steps, but I did see that there is a problem. It’s a very unusual problem but I think I have it diagnosed, but I haven’t come up with a way to fix it yet.
Clairvoyance works by scanning the entire database each time you type a key. If the database is large the scan can take a while, so Panorama pauses the scan periodically to check to see if another key has been pressed. If another key HAS been pressed, it stops the scan completely and starts over with the new text.
The problem is that Panorama is incorrectly thinking that another key has been pressed, so it is stopping the scan prematurely, resulting in no Clairvoyance match. I’ve narrowed this down to a single API call made to Apple’s code to determine whether another key has been pressed. This API call seems to be always telling Panorama that a key has been pressed, no matter what. The code calling this API was originally written back for OS X 10.7, so I’m not sure if the API has changed or what is going on, I’ll need to do some further research on this.
The problem doesn’t show up all the time because Panorama only infrequently performs this keyboard check. So it’s very dependent on the size of the database, the distribution of data, and exactly what has been typed in. It doesn’t appear to have anything to do with using the tab key or have anything to do with how the record was created. The problem will never occur if the item you are typing occurs less than 100 times in the database (Panorama never performs the keyboard check if there are less than 100 matches). So in Bruce’s database I ran into this problem with the word Transportation, which appeared over 1800 times in his database, but not with Tax, which appeared only 33 times.
When this problem does crop up, the only symptom is that there is no match for Clairvoyance. There is no problem with the database itself.