Fastest Related Record Duplications
While Claris/FileMaker offers a convenient Duplicate Record menu option, of which there's always a companion script step for most menus, there's more to the equation than simply duplicating your primary record. In fact, in most situations, it is necessary to duplicate both parent and related child records. You will likely need to duplicate a complete set of records to address the entire entity. For example, think of the relationship between Order, Line Items, Ship Address, and so on, in order for a customer to place a duplicate order.
To accomplish this, there are various native methods available, often involving multiple GTRR (Go to Related Record) steps. Additionally, within your script, you will need to carry a newly created primary key to all the newly created child records. Therefore, the question arises: "What happens when you need to duplicate a large number of record sets?" This was the question posed by Daniel Wood, who proceeded to test and document the methods and their benchmarked results in an article published on their blog at the FileMaker consultancy Digital Fusion.
When confronting this same question, there is a method that I personally favor and know to be quite fast, and I was eager to see how it would perform. I integrated this method into Daniel's file and discovered that by utilizing a plug-in, a significant speedup can be achieved. This article focuses on the fundamentals of how this technique works and provides guidance on its implementation in your own solutions. I'd like to express my gratitude to Daniel for his hard work and for granting permission to distribute a modified version of his file.