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Re: search progress control

Anton Bobrov wrote: 

its kinda kewl idea for ui progress indicators and alike. i'm not sure
about "update me every N entries" part tho. say you have a candidate
list you walk thru on the server side and presumably you wanna let the
client know how many you walked and evaluated against the filter. now
if you have result/s to return you can communicate that by attaching a
control response with that data but if you got no results to return
after you walked N entries/candidates how do you push updated progress
data to the client? from ui progress indicator and user perspective it
would become stale til the next result is sent and that can obviously
happen when you have a very large candidate list and few or no actual
results. did i misunderstood and you have something different in mind?

Good point. I hadn't really considered that because I assumed filtering the candidates will take trivial time compared to transmitting the results across a wire. Instead, how about "update every N candidates" and have the response attached to an Intermediate message if the Nth candidate doesn't actually get sent. (Here I'd worry if N is too small, and sending a lot of update messages in rapid succession.)

Howard Chu wrote: 
Dunno if there's already anything like this, I haven't bothered to
search yet.

I was considering adding the progress meter to ldapadd. Then it was
suggested that it might be useful for slapcat/ldapsearch as well. For
ldapsearch we would need a means to tell the client how large the result
set is expected to be. Currently it's easy for back-bdb/hdb to provide
this number, because they just walk through an IDL of candidates where
the IDL size is already known. Of course the real result set size may be
smaller due to actual filter evaluation.

This seems to call for a control that we could attach to a search
request "give me an estimate of the result set size and update me every
N entries". The response control would be attached to the first entry
and every N entries after that, with an updated estimate of the total
number of results. A control like this would be particularly useful for
administrators using GUIs to browse a large directory, to give feedback
about when they will receive the complete set of entries, and give an
opportunity to decide to abandon the search or continue.

Comments? 



--
  -- Howard Chu
  CTO, Symas Corp.           http://www.symas.com
  Director, Highland Sun     http://highlandsun.com/hyc/
  Chief Architect, OpenLDAP  http://www.openldap.org/project/