RE: server side sorting & paging?

["Jon Poulton" <jon@illumining.com>]

Its a real requirement for my application, and you appear to have missed the
point.
The filter you suggested is already in use to retreive all the Users
beginning with a
given letter.

The crux of the problem is: If I have 1000 results for "A" and I want
to display these in alphabetical order 1 page at a time- currently I have
to sort ALL the results IN MEMORY before retreiving only ONE PAGE from the
1000
things I just sorted. OK?

>>I believe LDAP is intended to be a large-scale distributed information
>>storage/retrieval mechanism.
And as such I would expect it to return results from a query in some sort
of clearly defined order. It doesnt.

How is it OpenLDAP does not support Server-side sorting and yet other LDAP
offerings
do? Are you saying companies such as IBM and Sun have gotten it all wrong?

I take it from your postings that even if someone did go to the trouble to
write a decent patch
for server side sorting that you would not include it in any future version
of OpenLDAP?


-----Original Message-----
From: Howard Chu [mailto:hyc@highlandsun.com]
Sent: 23 April 2004 10:45
To: 'Jon Poulton'; openldap-software@OpenLDAP.org
Subject: RE: server side sorting & paging?


> -----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