A Small Speed Observation on Custom Properties

[Gregory Lypny]

Hello Everyone,

I've only just begun using custom properties, and this may be old  
news to many of you but just in case I thought I'd pass it along.  I  
created a bunch of custom properties for a field called Data.  These  
properties are integers that identify the column or item location in  
a line where a particular piece of information is stored; for  
example, the colStudentName of fld "Data" = 3 tells me that the  
student's name is always the third item.

If you have to process many lines in such a field in a repeat loop,  
it will go much faster if you put the values of the custom properties  
into variables outside the loop and use the variables in the loop  
rather than calling the custom properties themselves within the loop.

The second part of the handler below runs about ten times faster than  
the first for a field with 100 lines.   And the speed is not affected  
by the fact that I initialized the variables using "add" instead of  
"put".

Regards,

	Gregory


on mouseUp

-- Retrieve the custom property in each pass of the repeat loop
   put the long seconds into theStartTime
   get fld "Data"
   repeat for each line thisLine in it
     put item (the colStudentName of fld "Data") of thisLine && \
     item (the colTime of fld "Data") of thisLine && \
     item (the colGrade of fld "Data") of thisLine & return after x
   end repeat
   put "Time with custom prop:" && the long seconds - theStartTime

   put empty into x

-- Compare by saving the custom properties to variables
    put the long seconds into theStartTime
   get fld "Data"
   add the colStudentName of fld "Data" into n
   add the colTime of fld "Data" into t
   add the colGrade of fld "Data" into g
   repeat for each line thisLine in it
     put item n of thisLine && \
     item t of thisLine && \
     item g of thisLine & return after x
   end repeat
   put return & "Time with variable:" && the long seconds -  
theStartTime after msg

end mouseUp