[PATCH] Implement Virtual List View (VLV) LDAP control (OID 2.16.840.1.113730.3.4.9)

[Uri Simchoni]

Hi Garming / Douglas,

That's truly great stuff!

- Is there a way in Samba AD DC to disable support for VLV control? 
(Windows has a way, probably because of the performance / resource 
implications)

- Have you been able to use cookies in searches against Windows DCs? 
(e.g. pass the cookie tests) I've tried it with OpenLDAP in the past and 
failed - whenever I place a cookie from last result in next request it 
returns an error.

Thanks,
Uri.

On 03/10/2016 06:32 AM, Garming Sam wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Attached are some patches to implement the LDAP virtual list view
> control within Samba. VLV is essentially a more elaborate version of
> paged results that allows you to ask for some sliding window of results
> from a previously performed sorted search (with the use of a cookie).
> The idea is to allow GUI tools to avoid repeating unnecessary searches,
> returning more results than it needs or forcing the server to
> re-evaluate a search (allowing better performance over standard LDAP
> searches).
>
> Included in the patches is a extensive test of VLV, in particular,
> modifications of the list while a VLV search exists. For instance,
> updating attributes of list items affect outstanding VLV requests, but
> they will not affect the existing sort order returned. This is
> accomplished is by storing a list of GUIDs to the results, which should
> be indexed, which is likely to be similar to how Windows implements the
> control.
>
> If we directly compare the list of results between us and Windows, there
> is still a major difference which lies with the sort ordering. At the
> moment, the patches rely on the existing sort capabilities within Samba
> (essentially ASCII, which ignores Unicode + locale, unlike Windows). We
> have further patches to improve the sorting which utilize the ICU
> package, however, some minor differences still remain. Furthermore, the
> effect on overall performance will have to be evaluated as all strings
> would now likely have to pass through a number of normalization and
> unicode routines, whereas before, a fast-path with ASCII existed.
>
>
> Regardless, simply implementing the virtual list view is the goal of
> these patches (not the sort). If there are any thoughts or comments,
> that would be much appreciated.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Garming
>