>>I have a customer table which has 3 associated child tables; customer.custid is the primary key in customer. Custid is the the foreign key in the child tables. I have "Update" and "Delete" rules established in the RI builder.
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>>When I have the customer table open and I do a block replace such as REPLACE ALL CUSTOMER.MAILOUT WITH .F. the update trigger runs for every record - which takes a long time. I assumed the trigger would only run if the key field was being changed.
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>>Is there some way I can prevent the trigger from running as this particular update has no requirement to check the RI of child tables? Or maybe I have a fundamental misunderstanding of how this works.
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>>Barry Sutton
>
>Barry,
>
>The trigger has to run. It will exit when it finds that the key field has not changed

Gregory,
OK, but despite this, it is taking in excess of 3 minutes to do the REPLACE ALL in 12,000 records over a network as the RI checks each of the child table key fields - running all the associated RI code to achieve this.
I have now introduced a stored procedure which checks the value of a global flag glDisableRIUpdates (.t. or .f.) and if set to .f. it allows the _ri_update routine to run; if set to .t. it returns without running the _ri_update code. This has speeded up the operation to a few seconds.
The only downside I can identify is that if I change the RI code via the inbuilt RI builder wizard, the _ri_update procedure name is reintroduced into the database container against the customer table and I have to amend this to point to my own (intermediate) stored procedure.
It seems odd to me that the _ri_update is called on fields other than the key fields as the latter are the only ones that would seem to be critical to the RI aspect.

Barry.