Sorting a large field of data

[Sarah Reichelt]

On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 11:24 AM, David Coker <davidocoker at gmail.com> wrote:
> Sure enough, after putting the field into a variable first, it helped a LOT!
>  Thank you very much, Eric!
>
>  >>>without locking the screen....
>
>  I'm not I understand exactly *how* to lock the screen before doing my
>  processing and maybe more importantly, what effect does that have on
>  performance?

Since Eric is probably asleep at this time :-) I thought I would chime in here.

Locking the screen is a common technique when a large graphical update
is going to happen e.g. creating, moving or deleting lots of objects
or changing the data in a large field or many small fields. You just
issue the command "lock screen". When the handler is finished, it will
unlock the screen automatically, but if you want the new display to
appear before then, just use "unlock screen". In certain cases, this
will cause a dramatic increase in speed as the engine only has to
display the graphics once rather than after every change.

Note that the term "lock screen" is rather a misnomer as only the
current window is actually locked.

There used to be a HyperCard stack detailing many ways to speed up
scripts and that helped me a lot. A while ago, I compiled a Revolution
equivalent which you can find here
<http://www.troz.net/Rev/tutorials/>. That might give you some more
ideas on speeding up your scripts.

Cheers,
Sarah