RE: server side sorting & paging?

["Howard Chu" <hyc@highlandsun.com>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-openldap-software@OpenLDAP.org
> [mailto:owner-openldap-software@OpenLDAP.org]On Behalf Of Jon Poulton

> I'll give an example of why one isnt much use without the other.
>
> Say I'm displaying a directory of all my applications users
> in a webapp and
> Im using OpenLdap to store the users. I want to display my
> users by the
> letter that their surname begins with (A, B, C ... Z), in alphabetical
> order, with one Page per letter (plus sub pages for letters
> which have a
> large number of associated users). Say I have 10,000 users.

If that's the best example you can come up with, it's still not very
compelling. Since your requirements are so simple and well defined, there's a
very simple solution. If you want one user-interface page per letter, issue a
search with an appropriate filter, e.g.
  (sn=A*)
to populate your 'A' page, etc. etc...

> What bothers me isnt that OpenLdap doesnt support sorting of
> search results,
> but that its not even on the roadmap for any future versions. Surely
> server-side sorting of results is quite a high priority requirement?

I believe LDAP is intended to be a large-scale distributed information
storage/retrieval mechanism. I don't believe it is an individual client
presentation system. One might as well complain that NFS doesn't sort
remote-mounted filesystem directories before presenting them to your
command-line shell. That's not the server's job, that is the user-interface's
job.

  -- Howard Chu
  Chief Architect, Symas Corp.       Director, Highland Sun
  http://www.symas.com               http://highlandsun.com/hyc
  Symas: Premier OpenSource Development and Support