Open Stack

So, Are we saying that UIs built on OpenStack APIs shouldn't be able to 
show traditional pagination controls? Or am I missing how this should 
work with marker/limit?

e.g. for 11 pages of content, something like: 1 2 3 .. 10 11

Thanks,
Kiall

On 13/08/13 22:45, Jay Pipes wrote:
> On 08/13/2013 05:04 PM, Gabriel Hurley wrote:
>> I have been one of the earliest, loudest, and most consistent PITA's about pagination, so I probably oughta speak up. I would like to state three facts:
>>
>> 1. Marker + limit (e.g. forward-only) pagination is horrific for building a user interface.
>> 2. Pagination doesn't scale.
>> 3. OpenStack's APIs have historically had useless filtering capabilities.
>>
>> In a world where pagination is a "must-have" feature we need to have page number + limit pagination in order to build a reasonable UI. Ironically though, I'm in favor of ditching pagination altogether. It's the lowest-common denominator, used because we as a community haven't buckled down and built meaningful ways for our users to get to the data they really want.
>>
>> Filtering is great, but it's only 1/3 of the solution. Let me break it down with problems and high level "solutions":
>>
>> Problem 1: I know what I want and I need to find it.
>> Solution: filtering/search systems.
>
> This is a good place to start. Glance has excellent filtering/search
> capabilities -- built in to the API from early on in the Essex
> timeframe, and only expanded over the last few releases.
>
> Pagination solutions should build on a solid filtering/search
> functionality in the API, where there is a consistent sort key and
> direction (either hard-coded or user-determined, doesn't matter).
>
> Limit/offset pagination solutions (forward and backwards paging, random
> skip-to-a-page) are inefficient from a SQL query perspective and should
> be a last resort, IMO, compared to limit/marker. With some smart
> session-storage of a page's markers, backwards paging with limit/marker
> APIs is certainly possible -- just store the previous page's marker.
>
>> Problem 2: I don't know what I want, and it may or may not exist.
>> Solution: tailored discovery mechanisms.
>
> This should not be a use case that we spend much time on. Frankly, this
> use case can be summarized as "the window shopper scenario". Providing a
> quality search/filtering mechanism, including the *API* itself providing
> REST-ful discovery of the filters and search criteria the API supports,
> is way more important...
>
>> Problem 3: I need to know something about *all* the data in my system.
>> Solution: reporting systems.
>
> Sure, no disagreement there.
>
>> We've got the better part of none of that.
>
> I disagree. Some of the APIs have support for a good bit of
> search/filtering. We just need to bring all the projects up to search
> speed, Captain.
>
> Best,
> -jay
>
> p.s. I very often go to the second and third pages of Google searches.
> :) But I never skip to the 127th page of results.
>
>   > But I'd like to solve these issues. I have lots of thoughts on all of
> those, and I think the UX and design communities can offer a lot in
> terms of the usability of the solutions we come up with. Even more, I
> think this would be an awesome working group session at the next summit
> to talk about nothing other than "how can we get rid of pagination?"
>>
>> As a parting thought, what percentage of the time do you click to the second page of results in Google?
>>
>> All the best,
>>
>>       - Gabriel
>>
>>
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>
>
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