Forms Takes TOOOOOO Long to Load

Question

Hi all,
I am having a form containing a tabbed canvas consisting of 7 tab pages.There are approximately 8 blocks containing nearly 300 items in total(mainly display items and buttons and no image items) and nearly 10 form level program units and 2 libraries attached.
In this scenario my forms takes 5 seconds to load and open up.I am running on a Windows 2000 machine(PIII,256 Mb Ram, 20 GB hard disk)in client server mode.
So how do I tune/Tweak my form to make it load quickly....
One more aspect I am wondering is that is there any way to track the DML statements forms issues implicitly whenever a commit operation happens.Is there any system variable similar to :system.last_query for this??.....
Any help/Suggestions are appreciated.....

Answer 1

Try to make VISBLE ON only those required.
Make Visible Property OFF for all the canvases initially and then Make VISIBLE ON on When-New-Form-Instance Trigger for required Canvases. Rest will be VISIBLE ON when they are accessed.
Do not Make items or canvases ON and OFF frequenty.
Use the concept of "message diff-ing"
hnOn the Form!&s initial display, hiding elements not immediately required. Use the item properties:
hnRAISE ON ENTRY = YES (Canvas only)
hnVISIBLE = NO
Forms when loading the Initial Form gets the Message Packets for Each item and each Canvas. For Example if you have 2 Canvases and set the Visible = YES at Design Time for both the Canvases then the Forms will first Load the Canvas and then gets the properties of each Item in the Canvas which will increase the time for Loading the Initial Screen.
When you set the Visible = NO at Design time and Set the Visible property on the When New Form Instance trigger then forms Server will send the Packets of all the Items in one Bundle and the Painting will be done after the form gets Initialized. This will reduce lot of Traffic on the Network as we are getting the item information in One packet for all the items, which will improve the timing on loading the Initial Form.
Care should be taken in defining the RAISE ON ENTRY property. Raise on Entry should be set to yes only for the Stacked canvases but not for Content Canvases. If you set the Content canvas RAISE ON ENTRY = YES for content canvas which contains stacked canvases then the Raise on Entry will show the Content Canvas and the all the stacked canvases will be disappeared.
For Ex. If your form has some Items on the Content Canvas and you have a Tab canvas which has 3 Tabs, which is Stacked to the Content. Then when you navigate to any item in the Content Canvas you will not see the Tab Canvases as the Raise on Entry on the Content Canvas will only raise the Content Canvas but not the Stacked Canvases.
Pay attention to TAB canvases that consist of several sheets where only one will ever be displayed.
For responsive switching between tabs, all items for all sheets on the canvas are loaded, including
those that are hidden behind the initial tab. Consequently, the time taken to load and initialize a TAB canvas is related to all objects on the canvas and not just to those initially visible. So the best approach is to put the other Tab canvases on a different Canvas(if possible) and the Canvas visible property to No and Raise on Entry to Yes which will pop up when the user navigates to that canvas.