BAD performance of Infopath (too slow)

[troubleD]

we are developing an application that tracks down the attendance of employees...
and infopath was used for entering the data. we have put validations and scripts ,repeating sections,drop down boxes in it..

how come when we are running the application..the infopath form runs very slow..when refreshing its secondary data sources and refreshing the view...and most likely the validations used in that form?

is this actually the behaviour of infopath? we are not using sp1 because it is not yet formerly released by microsoft (correct me if im wrong) . what can we do to improve the performance of infopath? we have only entered 2 records on the form yet it is like running a 1000000 records at a time.


thank you in advance.

 

[Brian Teutsch [MSFT]]

It's very difficult to give specifics about what is slowing down your form.
There were a number of things that might lead to slow performance, like
refreshing secondary data sources too often (lots of network traffic going
on...).

What is the performance of your form like when running it using Service Pack
1? If that is an improvement, I would (strongly) recommend using it. It
contains a huge number of performance enhancements, and forms you develop
under Service Pack 1 will continue to run when the final version is released
The final version is very close to the preview.

Thanks,
Brian

 

[troubleD]

thank you for your reply.

is selecting the drop down (which contains the secondary data source) means refreshing already? it causes a major delay on the performance and we have to wait at least 5 minutes (even more) when selecting the data from that drop down.

inserting and deleting a repeating section also slows down the process..

 

[Brian Teutsch [MSFT]]

It sounds like the dropdown has a large number of values, is that true? It's
possible even a couple of hundred could be a problem. That would probably
slow down many other things in the form, including inserting and deleting.

Brian

 

[troubleD]

3000 rows.. then it is better not to use infopath on this kind of application?

 

[Matthew Blain \(Serriform\)]

Try to figure out the bottleneck. If it's the dropdown (easy test: remove
the dropdown), you may be able to improve performance with filtering. For
example, create 2 dropdowns, one with letters A-Z, and the other with
employees. The second one is then filtered on the first (e.g. pick S and get
employees with first letter S). 3000 names is really too many to pick from
for a user anyway. If you have another fitlering mechanism (e.g.
department), you can use that too.

--Matthew

 

[MDS]

Would that really improve performance? Since it's still pulling all rows
from the database, just filter which are displayed? Wouldn't that actually
slow things down... now if you write code to change the query to add a where
clause... that would improve performance... although I don't know how to do
it in Infopath...

 

[Matthew Blain \(Serriform\)]

Yes, it can dramatically affect performance. There are a number of spots
where data is copied around, and creating the dropdown list is one of them.

One way to 'profile' it is to remove the box. Another performance test is to
make the query not run on form load, but rather call Query in response to a
button or other event.

--Matthew Blain
http://tips.serriform.com/