Actually MergeTxt is based on VFP's merge functionality, which is pretty fast. Although it relies on sending the output to a file and then reading the file back into the html_out variable, it's (surprisingly) almost twice as fast as VFP 7's new TEXTMERGE function, or even the new TEXT TO MEMVAR option.
What do you mean by hand-coded replacements? Are you referring to the use of STRTRAN? We have seen STRTRAN be really slow with large amounts of data. In such cases we have used the RegExp object, which is part of Microsoft's scripting library. The problem with STRTRAN and RegExp is that there's no real expression evaluation, so you can only cover a relative small number of replacement tags.
FWX scripts use totally different technology than MergeTxt. With FWX scripts, FoxWeb converts the script to a regular PRG file and inserts calls to Response.Write as necessary. Performance will vary between the two methods and will depend on the size of your HTML output, the number of replacements and the relative speed of your CPU and your hard-drive. We recommend that you run tests with your own scripts to determine which method will work best for you.
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Sent by Joe Cosby on 01/20/2003 12:13:43 PM:
Has anybody who was using Foxweb 1.x and upgraded ever tested the speed comparison between mergetxt and the fwx approach used in the newer versions?
We are in the midst of upgrading from 1.x . I was working on replacing the mergetxt with something faster, mergetxt seems to be fairly slow with large pages. I have been able to replace it with hand-coded replacements and in some cases they were as much as 30-40 x faster.
If the fwx approach is significantly faster already though, I could just switch to that and save myself a lot of work
Thanks for any responses