[netconf] Cursor or Offset in List-pagination drafts for netconf and restconf

[Jan Lindblad <[e-mail]>]

Dear NETCONF WG,

During today's presentation of List Pagination for YANG-driven Protocols, there was a discussion about whether either the use of cursors or offsets should be made mandatory. The at the center of this discussion was the notion that server implementors might not want to implement cursors because of their perceived complexity, and client implementors would not want to implement the logic for handling two different mechanisms.

I believe there is an easy way to resolve this, which makes both server and client side implementors happy:
+ Simplify the specification to say there is only one method.
+ That method is that the server returns an opaque cursor object at each next call.
+ Make a note to server implementors that one easy (but perhaps not very efficient) implementation of a cursor is to simply return the next offset the client should request. This implementation is completely stateless for the server. The client side can treat the returned cursor object as an opaque string.

Just my $.02 contribution :-)

Best Regards,
/jan