Slow GUIs: Why?

[Steve Vincent]

I don't use the GUIs a lot but when i do it is almost always to add either a security group or attribute to a dimension. In the attribute GUI especially, why is it so horribly slow to produce the initial view? On a dimension with only 33k elements (plenty of those consolidations) it is taking over 10 minutes to produce the GUI when all i want to do is add a new attribute. I know i can easily write a TI to add one and it'll be lightning quick, but honestly why produce a GUI to make that kind of maintenance "easy" when it is so slow? A cube view of the same data is near instant, so what is the GUI doing that the cube viewer isn't?

[John Hammond]

As you observe when you use the }Element_Atttributes~.cub to do the same thing editing the attributes is pretty much instant.

I think the application is just badly written and there's no pressure for them to fix it.

[Andy Key]

A process to create an attribute is one of the utility processes that live in my template directory for new servers.

My understanding is that the Edit Element Attributes dialog takes so long because it is loading the whole cube into the grid before displaying anything, whereas Cube Viewer only loads a couple of pages of data, then shows that data. When you page down/scroll down in cube viewer you will see a couple of pages instantly, but if you page fast enough you should see a slight pause or empty cells if you are scrolling whilst it goes away and gets more data.

Also the EEA dialog allows you to cancel your input (i.e. it is storing your changes until you hit OK rather than applying them immediately as per cube viewer), and does extra stuff like the checking and red highlighting on duplicate aliases.

Having said all that, I generally use the }ElementAttributes cubes...