Unfortunately, its recommended to discourage the use of the forward and back browser buttons. There is very little you can do from the application side to enforce that. But discussing about that is another topic altogether so I'll resist.
If your response varies with different types of browsers, then my gut feel is that it is not anything that is happening at the application layer that is causing those increased performance times or decreased performance times. It is something that the browser itself is doing. Not being much of an expert to deduce what that might be,, I'll leave it to some other browser experts to comment. Joe _____ From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Charlie Lotridge Sent: Monday, April 14, 2014 4:03 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: OpenWindow vs. PERFORM-ACTION-OPEN-URL ** Ah, got it. The bulk of the workflow is happening in an "On Display" action, and both methods invoke it (the exact same workflow). Somewhat counter-intuitively (given the situation), the faster OpenWindow action is also running an "On Window Loaded" action (which doesn't do much) but is NOT being run by the URL method. So just to make sure I'm clear, OpenWindow is running a superset of the workflow that PERFORM-ACTION-OPEN-URL is causing to be run. While setup to run AL logging to check this (I'd like to mention here how much I miss the easy setup for AL logging in the old WUT), I decided to use the timing info in the log to capture some quantifiable stats. I didn't exhaustively try all permutations (because it would've been exhausting), but each of the following represents the average of 8 tests of each type: Opening a comparatively simple form (148 mostly DO fields, 124 AL's, 38 AL guides): OpenWindow method using IE 11: 1.33 seconds URL method (to current window) using IE 11: 1.67 seconds OpenWindow method using Netscape: 1.10 seconds URL method (to current window) using Netscape: 1.55 seconds Opening a comparatively complex form (732 mostly DO fields, 946 AL's, 241 AL guides) [all using Netscape]: OpenWindow method: 1.53 seconds URL method (to current window): 2.17 seconds Using browser's history "Forward": 0.05 seconds URL method (to new window): 2.03 seconds Clearly the form size is having an impact on all methods, which makes sense. Netscape is uniformly faster than IE, which is also expected. What's the most interesting here to me is just how fast the "forward" mechanism...greased lightning. This is of course the same as the "back" mechanism, it was just more convenient for me to test it using "forward". Unfortunately I still don't know just why the OpenWindow method is faster than URL. I really like the functionality and usability of the URL method over OpenWindow, and am debating if it's worth the extra cost (or, more precisely, will the users think so). Anyway, thanks for the suggestions guys. -charlie On Sun, Apr 13, 2014 at 8:20 PM, Joe D'Souza <[email protected]> wrote: ** I had also thought of the authentication bit but I do not think it is that as the authentication is stored as a cookie, so once authenticated, until that cookie expires, another window that is opened should technically not request authentication again. When I said search, I didn't mean the search that happens on the request ID. That is already indexed and is optimal. I meant searches that may happen that may be designed on open window action or window loaded action, that may be happening when you do a the url thingy and does not when you use the open window action. I agree its unlikely to be that, but that's what I meant to ask you to check. Joe _____ From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of LJ LongWing Sent: Sunday, April 13, 2014 10:16 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: OpenWindow vs. PERFORM-ACTION-OPEN-URL ** Charlie, Is it possible the extra traffic is relating to authentication? I know when you do a open window action, the window is opened 'in the same session', but is it possible that when doing a URL call, it's having to communicate with the web server to determine which session is yours, which is taking a bit of time? On Sun, Apr 13, 2014 at 7:37 PM, Charlie Lotridge <[email protected]> wrote: ** Thanks for the suggestion Joe. Unfortunately the solution is not going to be that simple: I was actually using a request id in the search, so it's not going to get more optimal than that. I actually did a side-by-side comparison earlier. I set up an AL that would open an entry using OpenWindow, and another that opened the same entry using a URL, both effectively doing the same exact search (using a request id). The URL method took a full second more to load (about .6 for OpenWindow vs. 1.6 seconds for the URL). Using the browser's network monitor I can see that it's performing some additional network transactions, though (again) I really don't how to interpret these results yet. -charlie On Sun, Apr 13, 2014 at 1:57 PM, Joe D'Souza <[email protected]> wrote: ** I won't pretend to know the answer - but have you ruled out some piece of search workflow that might be running when you use the application command, which might not be running with an optimal search criteria, which might not be triggered during the regular Open Window action? I wouldn't have thought there would be a difference in the performance when essentially you are doing the same thing. Joe _____ From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList) [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Charlie Lotridge Sent: Sunday, April 13, 2014 1:51 PM To: [email protected] Subject: OpenWindow vs. PERFORM-ACTION-OPEN-URL ** Hi, Recently I was experimenting using PERFORM-ACTION-OPEN-URL instead of an OpenWindow action to open a Modify window on a specific entry (using the ?eid=<request id> parameter). It's easy enough to use and I certainly got it working, but the performance as compared to OpenWindow was abysmal. My guess is that this has something to do with browser caching...maybe this method can't use the cache or something. But I'm not sure since I don't really know anything about how browser caching works. I opened up the Network Monitoring console on Netscape and do see some significant differences in the request/response transactions, but I don't quite know how to interpret it. Does anyone have any thoughts or experience as to why I'm seeing this performance difference or how to mitigate it if at all possible? I've tried it on each of IE, Chrome, & Netscape with similar results. FYI here are my reasons for potentially wanting to use PERFORM-ACTION-OPEN-URL: when (in the natural course of navigating through my application) the user wishes to modify some entry, I have some generalized workflow that causes the app to open a Modify window. If the window is opened using OpenWindow, though, and the user subsequently attempts to refresh the browser page, it's converted to a Query (Search) window and the context is lost. Similarly, I was hoping to preserve browser history functionality for the user. If a user navigates from one entry to another (on the same for or a different one), then the browser's Back and Forward functions should work correctly and revisit the appropriate previously visited entries in modify mode, but with OpenWindow they don't. Using PERFORM-ACTION-OPEN-URL accomplishes both of these goals NICELY and I'd switch my generalized workflow to use it except for the performance issue. Any thoughts? Thanks, Charlie _ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are" and have been for 20 years_ _ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are" and have been for 20 years_ _ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are" and have been for 20 years_ _ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are" and have been for 20 years_ _ARSlist: "Where the Answers Are" and have been for 20 years_ _______________________________________________________________________________ UNSUBSCRIBE or access ARSlist Archives at www.arslist.org "Where the Answers Are, and have been for 20 years"
