Re: [Jmap] Hacker News Discussion - getMailboxes single data set vs tree primitives or paging

[Bron Gondwana <[e-mail]>]

On Mon, 8 May 2017, at 16:19, Neil Jenkins wrote:
> Having said that, there's a standard mechanism in JMAP for doing
> querying/sorting/paging of a record type (getFooList[1]), so if we do
> decide we want this capability it is mostly obvious how it should be
> specified. We'd include a filter option for *parentId* so you could
> easily fetch as a hierarchy if you want, and it would be easy to add
> an isArchived flag or similar later and filter on that if desired.> 
> As long as we still allow *getMailboxes* to be called with a null
> *ids* argument (therefore returning all mailboxes), clients can still
> just ignore all this if they always need to fetch the whole set up
> front. It's mainly therefore an extra burden on server
> implementations. So is it worth the tradeoff? Thoughts?
It makes sense to me to have a way to do paging/limiting.  It should be
easy enough for a server implementation.  We wouldn't even need
getMailboxes with a null ids, just a getMailboxList with a search/sort
that matches everything and a fetchRecords.
The tricky bit is that Mailboxes is a tree rather than a list, so the
I'm not sure how you would sort!  Simplest of course is to not do any
sorting, or to sort the entire list lexically by full path with the part
separator being a null so it always sorts by full name:
A
A/foo
A/foo/bar
A/foo bar

(that's super easy for me to do on the server, and to page into.  Can
also page just within a single parent level - which gets you both "*"
and "%" list equivalents from IMAP)
Bron.

--
  Bron Gondwana
  [e-mail]



Links:

  1. http://jmap.io/spec-core.html#querying-data