Re: should one single search be able to encompass several databases?

["Kurt D. Zeilenga" <Kurt@OpenLDAP.org>]

At 01:30 PM 7/19/2001, Peter W wrote:
>On Thu, Jul 19, 2001 at 12:13:09PM -0700, Kurt D. Zeilenga wrote:
>> At 11:25 AM 7/19/2001, Howard Chu wrote:
>
>> >There's an issue that I haven't quite resolved in my mind: when you chain
>> >multiple backends, and one of them has an error and is unable to fulfill a
>> >search request, but the others are able to provide results, what kind of
>> >error indication do you send back to the client?
>
>> Depends on whether the error occurred during finding or during searching.
>> If the error occurred during the finding of the base, then that error
>> needs to be reported.  If the error occurred during searching, it's generally
>> not reported UNLESS the searching cannot be continued (timeLimit, sizeLimit,
>> busy, other, ...).
>
>That sounds odd.

Let me clarify a bit.  When searching, a number of different
types of errors can occur:
        a) errors which must be ignored
        b) errors which must not be ignored
        c) errors in between

For a), the server presses on.
For b), the server doesn't press on and immediately returns the error.
For c), the server should press on but not return success (it should
return the most critical error of this type).

Most errors that one runs into are of type a) or b), hence my
"generally" qualification above.  One could treat all of c) as
b), but I generally believe it best to give the most complete
answer one can provide.