On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 5:38 PM, Pierangelo Masarati <masarati@aero.polimi.it
wrote:
I don't think slapd-meta(5) can handle cross-target paged results. It
would require some non-trivial bookkeeping of the control's cookie which
<personal opinion>
I wouldn't consider worth the effort for such a useless control.
</personal opinion>
On the surface i would agree, but there are many situations in which it is
impractical / impossible to process search results in a single gulp, without
the paged results control.
One case i can think of :
A web interface where you need to present ldap search results to a user via
a browser, where practicalities mean you cannot display more than say a few
hundred results, either for usability, speed or browser page-size
limitations (think maybe many thousands / millions of records, showing say
100 at a time).
In this situation you cannot store every complete search result for every
single user, in memory or in each user's session cookie, for many practical
/ scalability / efficiently reasons, more particularly because the user may
have what they want on the second page, so the rest of the unused search
result sits in memory or session until it expires, the user having navigated
away from the search results page and perhaps on to greener pastures (ui -
wise).
similarly for very large databases, where the search results may exceed the
physical memory of the server trying to return search results, so some part
of your data set would always be inaccessible without the paged result
control to load them in chunks that the ldap client can deal with.
Paged results may never be needed for small data sets, but start getting to
the 100K or 1M entries and you would grind to a halt pretty fast... even 10K
gets awkward 100 entries at a time :)
The lack of paged results on slapd-meta probably diminishes it's usefulness
for large data sets. I would also think that users of slapd-meta would
typically be at least medium sized users, who are trying to tack together
several non-trivial sized data sets, so there is some probability they will
stumble over this eventually.
Yes i know you added a personal opinion disclaimer, sorry about that.. but
"useless" is indeed a matter of opinion, those who need it will REALLY need
it. The users of large data sets must just {don't,cant,wont} be able to use
back-meta :)