I'm working on the school database. We have a counseling team who works with a list of about 60 students per team, and every day they go through the list of students and look at things like attendance. I originally did the attendance as repeating boxes with some complex calculations, but it got VERY slow, even when cached, and had to basically recreate it on every screen, so instead I turned it into a web portal and every night I cache prior attendance in a field as pre-written HTML so all we have to do is put a web portal on the screen and bob's your uncle (see screenshot below).
It's much faster and much more flexible, which is good because the schedule changed and some students have half-block classes which couldn't be represented before.
This works sparklingly on Macs, but on Windows when this web portal is on the screen popovers hard crash Filemaker (doing too many resources I imagine).
What ideas do people have for making this smoother? The options that come to mind for me are:
Turn the entire list view into a single HTML portal (gulp but maybe the best option)
Leave it as is, and don't use popovers (this is not ideal, but certainly preferable to having the report screen have less data for the staff to work with)
Go back to using some sort of repeating fields to dynamically draw the attendance within Filemaker
Maybe find something where I can run a routine nightly which basically snapshots the attendance as an image and stores it in a container field and display it that way. This seems convoluted, but maybe?
Other thoughts or ideas?
NOTE: I actually simplified the HTML portal to be "hi" and it still crashed, but I included the HTML file that I want to run there in case someone wants to see it.
What is the version of FMP/FMPA ? Until very recently FileMaker was using Internet Explorer technology to implement WebViewers, incompatible with recent JavaScript. Then, if my memory serves me well, this spring FMP 19 had an update which use (Chromium) Edge to implement WebViewers. That may explain your issues.
Sorry should have posted... fully patched, not the old IE:
Technical details
Server: Windows 19.3.2.203 hosted with fmphost.com
Mac client (which has no problems): 19.3.2.206
Windows clients (which don't work): 19.3.2.206
Since your "hi" webviewer crashes FM too, it sounds like something out of your control. Maybe it's a memory leak in FM's implementation of the new Webviewer. I believe Claris is close to releasing a new FMP version, so you could try that version soon to see if it's resolved the issue.
Otherwise I like your idea of using a schedule to save an image of the webviewer or maybe ditch the webviewer altogether for the sake of stability.
My suggestion would be to simplify he html. You should be able to utilize a table and CSS to accomplish this. Some prebuilt JavaScript libraries may not work well in all browsers which Iām guessing might be the issue?
Instead of storing all of the HTML code, only store the data. You can load the data into the web viewer in a couple different ways. One way is to use the data to have your scripts generate the HTML. Another way is to create some custom JavaScript to create the table after the web viewer has loaded. Storing the data in JSON format would be ideal with either method.
PS: You could try using card windows instead of popover windows. On Windows, there is an object layering issue where the webviewer is always the topmost object. While on a Mac this is not an issue, on Windows, it has always been an issue. popover windows can get stuck behind the webviewer on Windows PCs. There are many tricks to positioning the card window to have it mimic a popover window.
