Best modality for rather large stacks

[FMoyer at aol.com]

Hi:

I have to port a bunch of Hypercard Stacks over to Revolution. A typical 
stack contains 5000 cards with one background and about 50 fields. While these are 
not huge stacks, they are big enough where if I simply port them as they are 
to Revolution, searches will be glacially slow. I need to be able to search 
quickly and see different views of the material. For example, one of the stacks 
is my address stack. Most of the time I just need to find a person's name; at 
other times, I need to see a list of everyone with a certain zip code, or a 
list of those who responded to a mailing, etc.

Can anyone advise on the best mode? At the moment I am inclined to create a 
one-card stack that links to a text file. In the text file, one line of text 
would contain all of the data for one card. So to "go" to card 533 the computer 
would simply read line 533 of the text file, parse it, and set up the data 
onto the fields.   This method seems really good as searches are very fast using 
"lineoffset", and if things get fouled up I can simply open the text file in 
any word-processor and fix it. I also like the fact that I don't have to 
continually save the stack -- in my script the text file would be continually 
updated as fields are changed, cards created/deleted.

Before I invest the time in the above method, can anyone tell me if I am 
taking the right approach? For example, what about using arrays, or Valentina? I 
don't know anything about them. I'm not asking for detailed instructions, just 
a hint at what is the best approach.

Thanks for your suggestions.

Fred Moyer