I mentioned this as an aside in another topic, but it’s time to bring it front and center. I have been building several new text lists and they present amazing possibilities. But there is a behavior I cannot get past without just plain getting lucky.
The list I am currently working on has Database Navigation turned on. As advertised, clicking on a line of that list takes me to that actual record in the database. If I have the data sheet open where I can watch it while I do this, the change of record is obvious. Except when it doesn’t act this way. Here I am with a certain record highlighted in the text list. I click on another record, and the highlight goes there briefly, then jumps back to where it started. The active record in the database never changed. I can do this over and over and the same thing happens. Same thing if I try to arrow up or down to an adjacent record. The only (unreliable) way around it is to hit the arrow key several quick times in a row, now it may actually move to another record and stay there, but usually fewer records than the number of times I clicked the arrow. For example, if I click the down arrow 5 quick times, it might move 3 records down rather than 5. Just now I tried it again, in 5 attempts to change a record by clicking on another line, it did what it should do 3 times and did the jumpback thing 2 times. I can’t find a pattern to it, but definitely some days are better than others. I changed my list to having Database Navigation turned off, and it stopped jumping around, but I can’t be certain that this is definitive behavior or just how it is acting now.
If Database Navigation is the key to the problem, then it seems there is a struggle over who is in charge - sometimes the database wins by refusing to change the current record, sometimes the Text List wins by causing the change.
Sometimes I see the same behavior in Help; trying to select a topic in the left pane just results in having the selection jump back to where it was, and I have to keep clicking what I want until it agrees. I suspect that Help is built on the Text List framework and has the same vulnerabilities.
I am trying to narrow down what causes what, but this is also one of those lucky days when I get lots of beachballs and I’ve already crashed twice doing simple things.
Is anyone else seeing this?
The silence in response to this post is deafening; I can understand no one having an explanation, but I have trouble believing I’m the only one experiencing this.
I have more info, though. Among the several Text Lists I have built so far, the performance of each seems to be directly tied to how many records are in the database. One that I am working on now has 56 records and is very responsive. Another one in a database with 9000 records (which uses database navigation) is a little sluggish but very usable. The one I am describing in my first post has over 14,000 records and is impossible to use. Not only will my attempt to choose a line fail most of the time, I see regular beachballs, giving me a few seconds between them to try to do something; I will see the beachballs come and go like this even if I am just watching, as long as my TextList form is the active one. Are we going to have to live with this limitation, or is there something else going on that I can actually solve? The various TextLists are constructed and used very similarly.
I guess I’ll just talk to myself here.
Returning to my recalcitrant Text List in the database with 14,000 records today, I again experience repeated cycles of 10 seconds of beachball interspersed with a couple of seconds grace. If I can sneak in a click in the grace period, I might see the response to that click a couple of beachball cycles later. What I noticed today is that this happens both in Data mode and Graphics mode. I wouldn’t think it would be deep in whatever processing it is trying to do without having the data active, but there we are.
But today I had a brief respite from it. I wish I knew how or why. In the middle of trying to get something done on it, updating a procedure, my Text List suddenly started acting the way I need it to act - near instantaneous response to clicks of all types, screen updates immediate, no beach balls, easy access to all my data. Nice to know it can be done! I went to do some other work with other apps on other screens, and when I got back the beachballs were back too. While it is doing this, Activity Monitor shows that PanoramaX is using 95% to 180% of the CPU time doing nothing (when it isn’t “not responding”).
I run lots of applications on this machine, some of them quite complex and computation intensive. Never have I had any of them behave like this. Wait, I take that back. When PanX is using “more than all” of the CPU resources, my entire computer bogs down too. More than once I have had to lean on the power button to finally get relief.
Can someone tell me what the hell is going on?