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RE: Plea for Server Side Sorting

On Fri, 1 Apr 2005, Kurt D. Zeilenga wrote:
At 09:49 AM 4/1/2005, Armbrust, Daniel C. wrote:
Just making the point that sorting results isn't a limitation of LDAP design in general 

Your are arguably incorrect in this point. LDAP is designed
as an access protocol to a distributed directory service, and
that limits the kinds of capabilities the service can reasonably
be expected to offer.

So the question boils down to: does it seem reasonable for a directory service to sort results. Its hard to imagine a corporate directory in the real world that /isn't/ sorted, so for the computer equivalent to be designed in a way that doesn't allow for sorting would seem to be poorly modeled.

In terms of considering LDAP as special-purpose database, there aren't many databases that don't provide some sort facility. SQL does. The UNIX command line does. Mainframes and Minis with the many wacky variations on ISAM do.

In terms of IS system design and putting functionality in the most logical place, we can have hundreds of different clients sort results or have the server sort results. It seems quite clear that having the server sort results puts the code in the fewest places, which naturally leads to fewer bugs, is better for programmer's mental health everywhere, and so on.

So in considering this from three different perspectives it seems not only reasonable, but self-evident that LDAP should allow for sorting.

--
</chris>

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