>Cetin,
>
>> IMHO datasource won't be the bottleneck. ie: On my box (Athlon 650, 192
>> Mb,Office2000) merging to a new document advances roughly 10K records/minute.
>
>We agree with you when the templates do not contain any logic. However, someone long ago decided to put almost all logic in the Word templates instead of performing the logic on the mainframe before passing us the appropriate value.... About 25% of our 250+ templates contain 25-500 (sometimes embedded) conditions. Word 97 processes these templates rather "quickly" (2-4 seconds per record but we canm't say the same thing about Word 2002 (8-60 seconds per record). We normally process 400-500 complicated letters a night and, if they take 30 seconds each on average, the job is unlikely to complete within our allocated time window.
>
>We have thrown hardware at the solution (RAM, faster CPU) and, although it helps some, it has not yet resolved our problem. Our Client is adament about keeping the mainframe system as is and wants an entirely PC solution.
>
>Our goal is to show him that the templates will take too long to print, even if we used the data source type Word handles best. If convinced, we believe he will allow us to write a VB or VFP program to duplicate the template logic and to rewrite the templates to be straight mail merge. Not a good solution - we believe the logic should be on the mainframe - but it's the best idea we came up with so far. The Client didn't appreciate our initial costs estimates but we believe he will bite this bullet rather than have his boss on his back.
>
>A terrible assignment for both of us from a political and technical point of view but the Client pays us well and it's hard to walk away from a cash cow in these tough economic times....
>
>Anyway, we are just rambling.
>
>Thanks for your help,
>Raven & Daniel
Second(s) per record !!! Oh my :)
Technically it should be hard to explain to your client that word uses VBA and that it's extremely slow. On a rough calculation I expect 400-500 letters should be printed in half an hour (with a 20ppm printer maybe). Data retrieveal and processing would be ahead of printing speed.
Maybe you could convince him to rewrite all the templates and even write them on the fly with say HTML/XML. All conditions moved to VFP side you might showcase 'records per second' vs 'seconds per record'.
PS: When I said 10K/minute I was thinking it's slow for a nonprinting speed.
Cetin
