| Speeding Up App Designer | KEVIN RESCHENBERG
10-03-2005 |
Developers on PeopleSoft systems typically use Application
Designer frequently. It's a great tool, but it can be
slow at times. I've seen three particular cases of
significant sluggishness. For one of them, I have a tip
that could save you a lot of time. For the other two, I
have no information but would be interested to hear from you.
App Designer is a large program in terms of its Windows resource
usage. By "resources" I'm referring to things such as the number
of windows you can have open at any time, and this includes
all of the edit boxes, checkboxes and other elements. This means that at many
(but not all) installations, a user can have only one
instance of App Designer open at a time. Running another
instance results in either an "out of resources" message or
the inability of any running program to
open a new window. So users may find themselves opening
and closing App Designer repeatedly in order to switch
between the development and testing databases.
Now, App Designer is capable of starting up in just a few
seconds. If you find it takes much longer—several minutes
or more—it may be due to the way your menu security
is designed.
App Designer checks each permission list that's assigned
to you, probably to build the "Go" menu. You are likely
to be running in two-tier mode, so
it could be making thousands to trips to the database during
this exercise if you have very many permission lists.
There's an easy way out
of this. Clone your ID. For the new ID, remove any roles
related to access to the various functional menus. Keep
your access to the PeopleTools menu and any other permission
lists related to your access as a developer, but drop
the roles related to HR or Financials functionality.
If one role includes both, create a new role that
contains only what you need and assign it to the cloned ID.
Use this cloned ID for most of your development work.
The only reason to use your original ID, then, would be
to get access to some menu item for two-tier debugging
purposes. I'd guess that you could use the stripped-down
ID 99% of the time. When using that ID, you should see
App Designer starting up much faster.
Here are the other two areas that have seemed slow to me,
and I'd be interested in any information you might have.
The first area is the "Find in..." function when searching
PeopleCode for a particular string in the entire
database. At some installations
this can go on for an hour. At others, it starts out slowly
for the first 10-15 seconds but then seems to accelerate
to warp speed after that. The other item is an odd one.
It seems that at some installations, if you try to open
an object, waiting for the object type dropdown list to
become active takes a very long time. This is true
even though the list of object types is actually very
short.
On a side note, I was a little disappointed to see
that Dave Duffield is only number 320 on the Forbes
list of the richest Americans. It seems that having
$1.1 billion doesn't even get you into the top 300
anymore!
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