[Xesam] Need paged search mode for xesam

[Mikkel Kamstrup Erlandsen]

2008/5/7 Jamie McCracken <jamie.mccrack at googlemail.com>:

>
> On Wed, 2008-05-07 at 16:29 +0200, Jos van den Oever wrote:
> > 2008/5/7 Jamie McCracken <jamie.mccrack at googlemail.com>:
> > >  we need ranges in order to search efficiently - having potentially
> > >  random hit IDs passe to that function means we cannot optimise (no
> way
> > >  to tell in advance if its a range)
> > >
> > >  Its so bad that we will add an extension GetPagedHits ourselves if no
> > >  one else wants it!
> >
> > You're seeing ghosts. It's trivial and very quick to check if a range
> > of numbers is sequential.
> > If it's sequential, you can use your optimized range function, if not,
> > get the hits one by one. For the later you need a function anyway.
> >
>

Jamie?  Can you comment on Jos' answer? If you implement paged hit retrieval
anyway, it would be a very cheap optimization to check if hit_ids are
sequential in GetHitData and then take the optimized path.

If it is not enough to simply change the documentation of GetHitData to
imply that it is more advanced way to retrieve hits (and not mainly a tool
to use on HitsModified), can you then be more specific about your needs (for
the method)? I am thinking:

 * A use case - No app I know of will require the API you describe. Not even
the native Tracker search tool (it can only scroll pages sequentially).
Anywhere libbeagle is usable, so is Xesam, but with a more advanced
interface.
 *  Should it take an array of fields to retrieve, or use the hit.fields
property like GetHits?

If you want to take the fields as an arg I think it is earily close to
GetHitdata, but if you want to use hit.fields, ie GetPagedHits(in s search,
in u offset, in u count, out aav hits), then it makes more sense to me.

Cheers,
Mikkel
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