Filedef the big guys

[nonskanse]

Hi! I am trying to filedef something similar to the below. I am however not as familiar with the filedef method as other methods. I would like to know:
1a- how to filedef compound documents because the below runs a little slow (surprise surprise), possibly in a loop for different areas (to get a file &area1.pdf). I would like to place these files on the server
1b- How to get to the filedef'd &area1.pdf (&area2.pdf, etc) once on the server.

I apologize for the huge question here, but this fex takes a bit over 30 seconds to run on a good day when the server isn't busy.

SET COMPOUND=OPEN NOBREAK
EX APP/prog1
SET COMPOUND=NOBREAK
EX app/prog2
EX APP/prog3
SET COMPOUND = NOBREAK
EX APP/graphpg1
EX app/graphpg2
SET COMPOUND=CLOSE
EX app/graphpg3
-RUN
-INCLUDE APP/mesgtxt
-EXIT

 

[WFGuru]

FILEDEF cannot be used to concatenate PDF documents. It can be used to concatenate flat files. The way you're doing it is correct but if there is a performance issue, there are other things to look at. Run each of the reports indevidually and see if there are any causing a problem. Is there enough CPU and memory available? If the reports are going against a relational RDBMS, did you trace the SQL to see if the query is being optimized?

 

[nonskanse]

Thanks for the info. The reason that the file runs slow is that there are about 25 total other fexes going into it. Each graphpg file has 4-5 graphs in it (all running off of different tables). This could be a cause of the time issue.
Is there a way to put all of the graphs into 1 "graphpg" pdf generating fex and have them start new pages instead of running down and off the bottom of one page? I notice that generating a 5 graph pdf page can take 6-12 seconds (depending on how much cpu is being used at the time). Is this the graph->gif conversion taking up time?

Thanks again for the information so far. I'll keep trying to reduce the time on this.

 

[WFGuru]

The COMPOUND syntax is what creates the single PDF document. If you want users to see all graphs but each on its own page use POSITION in the stylesheet to place them where you want. As far as performance goes, generating graphs will always increase response time. If you want to see if that's where the bottleneck is, change the GRAPH FILE to TABLE FILE and comment out any graph specfic code. If the response time is still too slow, it's not the graph, it's the code.