Re: Returning sorted sets

[Michael <mi...@st...>]

ni...@Br... wrote:
> 
> Ideally, I want my search interface to return just 20 records at a time,
> which are a sorted subset of a larger result set.  Does the LDAP
> protocol allow this?

The right solution would require deploying two LDAP extended
controls:
- paged results (OID 1.2.840.113556.1.4.319, see RFC2696)
- Server Side Sorting of Search Results
  (OID 1.2.840.113556.1.4.473, see RFC2891)

But unfortunately
1. with python-ldap you can't currently make use of extended
   controls and
2. the server has to support both controls (which you can
   check by looking at attribute supportedControl of its
   RootDSE).

> I'm trying to think how else to do a multiple-page
> search interface, ala current search engines with the footer

Well, you could retrieve all search results, sort them on the client
side and cache it for the next page hits. But take care of security
considerations!

My web2ldap cheats: It simply invokes a async search and retrieves
the search results for the currently viewed page without doing any
sorting. I considered the user to give up looking through the search
results on the first page anyway. ;-)

Ciao, Michael.