RE: draft-reschke-webdav-search-05 - a few questions on the draft

Another possible usecase is pagination! Consider I restrict the results to 
top 500 documents (say sorted by relevance). However I would paginate the 
results into say 10 pages (50 per page). I could issue the first search to 
identify the documents and issue another search to retrieve the data for the 
first 50 documents identified by the first search. I could then send this to 
the client while I continue building the remaining 9 pages asynchronously. 
The chances that end-users would click beyond the first page is very low. 
However I cannot preclude the possibility. The reasons for pagination are 
well established and doing it the way mentioned here I would think would 
improve the response time (although there are a lot of things that could 
prove me wrong especially the issuing multiple search requests).

[Note: I am not saying DASL should support pagination but instead that it 
would seem to preclude the possibility]

Coming back to the searching in different collections use-case, issuing 
multiple search requests I believe not only places a huge burden on the 
client but I am not sure I like the performance characteristics either. For 
example even considering that the client can build the consolidated search 
results, it seems to me to be accurate the client cannot make use of the 
max-results feature in a very efficient manner. Lets say we want to present 
the end-user the top 500 documents. If I have sort clause then it seems to 
me the max-results clause goes pretty much out of the window. (ex:consider 
sorting by date you need the most recently modified documents, in which case 
it not possible to apply max-results at all on the individual search 
requests.) If I have to retrieve the entire result sets and then build the 
consolidated resultset and apply max-results that to me would seem to have 
horrendous performance characteristics.

[I am guessing Julian had all these issues in mind when she said its not 
trivial:)]

prakash

>From: "yamuna prakash" <yamunap@hotmail.com>
>To: www-webdav-dasl@w3.org
>Subject: RE: draft-reschke-webdav-search-05 - a few questions on the draft
>Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2003 07:25:18 +0000
>
>
>Actually I guess searching from the root might not be an option if I have 
>to exclude certain collections from the search... in which case it seems 
>like the client has to do a whole host of things if it is to present the 
>search results in a consolidate manner to the end-users.
>
>prakash
>
>>From: "yamuna prakash" <yamunap@hotmail.com>
>>To: www-webdav-dasl@w3.org
>>Subject: RE: draft-reschke-webdav-search-05 - a few questions on the draft
>>Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2003 07:11:55 +0000
>>
>>
>>Currently we have a use case where in we need to search under different 
>>collections and then build a consolidated search result and present it to 
>>the user. We would like to avoid searching from the root with the 
>>possibility of having to specify infinite depth, to ensure the search does 
>>not take too much time. As Elias mentioned in his email, this can be 
>>achieved by issuing multiple requests, but as Julian mentioned this of 
>>course opens us up to the issue of what having to manage top 
>>(max-results), sorting, etc i.e. in effect the client having to build a 
>>layer on top of DASL.
>>
>>
>>I am quite new to DASL and WebDAV and in fact I am still finding my way so 
>>to speak.
>>
>>Given the above fact, my next question might sound incredibly stupid... 
>>but...
>>
>>if each collection has different properties ( I am not sure if this is 
>>possible) and if each collection acts as a node in a tree, I am curious as 
>>to how searching within multiple scopes would be different from searching 
>>in a tree with arbitrary depth?
>>
>>Is it the case that all collection nodes are consistent (i.e. have the 
>>same properties) and thus searching within multiple scopes is a different 
>>beast?
>>
>>
>>thanks,
>>prakash
>>
>>
>>>From: "Julian Reschke" <julian.reschke@gmx.de>
>>>To: "Wallmer, Martin" <Martin.Wallmer@softwareag.com>,"'yamuna prakash'" 
>>><yamunap@hotmail.com>, <julian.reschke@gmx.de>
>>>CC: <www-webdav-dasl@w3.org>
>>>Subject: RE: draft-reschke-webdav-search-05 - a few questions on the 
>>>draft
>>>Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2003 08:28:46 +0200
>>>
>>>
>>>Correct.
>>>
>>>Keep in mind that allowing multiple issues may be more complex than you
>>>think. For instance, it's trivial to just repeat the same query for the
>>>different scopes, but how does this affect sorting/ranking/max-results?
>>>
>>>Julian
>>>
>>>--
>>><green/>bytes GmbH -- http://www.greenbytes.de -- tel:+492512807760
>>>
>>>
>>
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Received on Tuesday, 30 September 2003 11:24:17 UTC