Technical Brief

FileMaker Go 1.2.1 Technical Brief
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Hosting/Sharing
FileMaker Go does not allow sharing or hosting of any kind. If a file is local to an iOS device, only a single user is
supported.
Save/Send Records As
Save/Send records as Excel and Snapshot Link are not supported.
Performance Considerations
JustaswithFileMakerPro,developersneedtoconsiderbothnetworkspeedandoperationalspeedwhen
building databases for FileMaker Go. In testing there were few surprises. Performance with FileMaker Go is far
more subject to its network connection than to anything else. Committing and creating records on a 3G network
can take longer than expected, and sub-summary or sorting routines may be problematic. Generally speaking,
operations that touch multiple records or modify keys that drive relationships should be carefully reviewed and
tested for performance.
Performance Recommendations
Avoid long looping scripts, especially those that open and commit record data. If you need to work with large
blocks of data, you might explore some of the strategies presented in the next section on scripting or choose
to execute those routines that may be too slow on a mobile device in FileMaker Pro or as a scheduled script in
FileMaker Server.
Be mindful of sub-summary reports and avoid large found sets. A list view with a large found set of records and
one or more sub-summary parts can cause users to wait while the records are sorted and totaled. You might
consider simplifying the list layout by removing sub-summary parts or use other means, like script triggers or
navigational elements, to reduce the size of the found set.
Any images or graphics on your layouts should be compressed as much as possible.
Use portal sorting and relationship sorting judiciously. On a local area network, portal sorts can perform well, but
on a wide area network with FileMaker Pro and FileMaker Go, sorted portals significantly increase the time it takes
a layout to render.
In our benchmark tests, a MacBook Pro that was connected to the WAN via WiFi performed similarly to FileMaker
Go on an iPhone and iPad. Setting aside the lower bandwidth available when connecting via 3G, the mobile
devices only showed noticeably slower performance on those operations that required local processing power. It
was interesting to note how completely some expensive operations are offloaded to the server. For example, one
test involving a find on an unstored field in 350,000 records delivered almost identical results on a LAN connected
Dual Quad Core Mac Pro, a WAN connected MacBook Pro, and both WAN connected mobile devices. In contrast,
an intentionally malformed recursive function displayed in a calculation field on a list of 300 records reached its
recursion limit in under a second on the LAN connected Mac Pro, less than ten seconds on a WAN connected
MacBook Pro, and took more than ten minutes to conclude on the iPhone and iPad. This being the case, be wary of
processor-intensive tasks. In these same tests, performance degraded sharply on the 3G network.