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I have been following this exchange of ideas on how to solve/implement pagination. I would ask you to keep in mind that a solution needs to take into account a split LDAP/SQL backend (you are not always dealing with a single Keystone SQL database). Having a split backend means that the query information is divided between both backends and that you may not have as much flexibility with the LDAP backend

Mark.

-----Original Message-----
From: Jay Pipes [mailto:jaypipes at gmail.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, August 13, 2013 10:10 AM
To: openstack-dev at lists.openstack.org
Subject: Re: [openstack-dev] [keystone] Pagination

On 08/13/2013 12:55 PM, Lyle, David (Cloud Services) wrote:
> The marker/limit pagination scheme is inferior.

A bold statement that flies in the face of experience and the work already done in all the other projects.

 >The use of page/page_size allows access to arbitrary pages, whereas limit/marker only allows forward progress.

I don't see this as a particularly compelling use case considering the performance manifestations of using LIMIT OFFSET pagination.

 >In Horizon's use case, with page/page_size we can provide the user access to any page they have already visited, rather than just the previous page (using prev/next links returned in the response).

I don't see this as a particularly useful thing, but in any case, you could still do this by keeping the markers for previous pages on the client (Horizon) side.

The point of marker/limit is to eliminate poor performance of LIMIT OFFSET queries and to force proper index usage in the listing queries.

You can see the original discussion about this from more than two years and even see where I was originally arguing for a LIMIT OFFSET strategy and was brought around to the current limit/marker strategy by the responses of Justin Santa Barbara and Greg Holt:

https://lists.launchpad.net/openstack/msg02548.html

Best,
-jay

> -David
>
> On 08/13/2013 10:29 AM, Pipes, Jay wrote:
>
>> On 08/13/2013 03:05 AM, Yee, Guang wrote:
>>> Passing the query parameters, whatever they are, into the driver if 
>>> the given driver supports pagination and allowing the driver to 
>>> override the manager default pagination functionality seem reasonable to me.
>
>> Please do use the standards that are supported in other OpenStack services already: limit, marker, sort_key and sort_dir.
>
>> Pagination is meaningless without a sort key and direction, so picking a sensible default for user/project records is good. I'd go with either created_at (what Glance/Nova/Cinder use..) or with the user/project >UUID.
>
>> The Glance DB API pagination is well-documented and clean [1]. I highly recommend it as a starting point.
>
>> Nova uses the same marker/limit/sort_key/sort_dir options for queries 
>> that it allows pagination on. An example is the
>> instance_get_all_by_filters() call [2].
>
>> Cinder uses the same marker/limit/sort_key/sort_dir options for query 
>> pagination as well. [3]
>
>> Finally, I'd consider supporting the standard change-since parameter for listing operations. Both Nova [4] and Glance [5] support the parameter, which is useful for tools that poll the APIs for "new" >events/records.
>
>> In short, go with what is already a standard in the other projects...
>
>> Best,
>> -jay
>
>> [1]
>> https://github.com/openstack/glance/blob/master/glance/db/sqlalchemy/
>> api.py#L429
>> [2]
>> https://github.com/openstack/nova/blob/master/nova/db/sqlalchemy/api.
>> py#L1709
>> [3]
>> https://github.com/openstack/cinder/blob/master/cinder/common/sqlalch
>> emyutils.py#L33
>> [4]
>> https://github.com/openstack/nova/blob/master/nova/db/sqlalchemy/api.
>> py#L1766
>> [5]
>> https://github.com/openstack/glance/blob/master/glance/db/sqlalchemy/
>> api.py#L618
>
>
>
>
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