I'm a heavy user of views, but one issue I'm still struggling with is re-indexing them. I have several search screens in which a user can search by any number of parameters. Because the data is pretty heavily normalized, I really want to use a view to pull it all together. However in this situation, I still use relations because of the speed of reindexing. There is too much of a lag time reindexing the view each time they change the field in which they're searching (i.e. lastname vs. company name).

I've played around with a couple of alternatives. Using LOCATE FOR seems to work OK, but not nearly as well as searching the indexed table. Another alternative is to use a view then search the actual table, get the key, and return to the view to retrieve all the corresponding data (keeping the view indexed by that key). Since the tables open with the view, this doesn't seem to yield any performance hit. The bummer with this is if you display the view, you'd still need to re-index it for display purposes.

Is there a conventional wisdom as to the best technique? Or am I missing a fundamental element of indexing views?

Thanks in advance (and I'll thank any responders the 5th of July).

Happy 4th,

Dave