temporary stack files?

[Richard Gaskin]

Tim Selander wrote:

 > I'm having one such issue now, that I would like to ask for
 > collective help with. I set up a stack, imported a csv file of
 > about 150,000 records as individual cards -- only about 9MB of
 > data total -- and then 'saved' the stack.
 >
 > The import took hours. OK. The save seems to have hung. Spinning
 > beachball, 'Saving....' LC dialog stuck on screen, Mac reporting
 > that LC is 'not responding.'

I've seen that with large numbers of cards going back to MetaCard 2.1. 
The stack structure does an excellent job of proving a place for UI for 
a database, but not as a substitute for a database itself.  Beyond about 
5,000 cards things get exponentially slower, as you've found.

Some here will tell you to put all that in a database, and indeed SQLite 
is very useful.

But you might even consider just keeping the data in a delimited file 
(though tab-delimited is much more efficient than CSV).

Use the stacks for UI, and keep the data in a variable, displaying what 
you need as you need it, and you'll be fine.


 > In the Finder, the stack shows a file size of a few kilobytes.
 > But 9MB of data has been imported...
 >
 > So, after this wordy intro...
 >
 > Does LC7, like much other software, use temporary, pre-saved,
 > files as the user manipulates things? If so, where are they? Can
 > they be accessed? And is there any way to get that temporary file
 > saved so that the hours of import time are not wasted?

Stacks exist only in memory until a save is successfully completed.  If 
a save is unable to be completed, you should find a copy of the stack 
file that was being written to in the same folder as the one you have 
open, with the name being the same but preceded with "~".  This 
temporary file will be checked after a save to ensure integrity, and 
when all goes well the original is deleted and this temp file renamed to 
match the original.  But if the save is interrupted, you should find 
that incomplete file in that folder.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com