[keycloak-dev] Pagination Re: User Federation Provider Cache

[Bill Burke]

On 6/17/16 5:10 AM, Marek Posolda wrote:
> On 16/06/16 16:38, Bill Burke wrote:
>>>>> Sync users
>>>>> --------------
>>>>> We should still keep the option to sync users into Keycloak DB as we
>>>>> have now. Note some persistent storages like LDAP are limited with
>>>>> pagination. So the easiest possibility for some admins is just to sync
>>>>> users, so they can easily search them in admin console.
>>>>>
>>>> Doing a full import just to support pagination is overkill. I'm
>>>> guessing that a lot of deployments will not manage users through the
>>>> Keycload admin console.  We can offer a manual a Sync SPI that
>>>> providers can implement.
>>> Maybe it's overkill for 90% of deployments, but remaining 10% want to
>>> see all LDAP users in admin console immediatelly and hence want to sync
>>> them? IMO it's always good to have SPI flexible so it can easily support
>>> all the possible requirements. However I understand that it's not always
>>> possible...
>>>
>>
>> This is only an issue for large query result sets where you want to do
>> pagination.  IIRC, we couldn't figure out a way to do this in a
>> scalable manner without imports.
> yeah, I also can't see how to do pagination without imports, assuming
> the 3rd party store (ie. LDAP) doesn't have pagination support.
>
> So then again, the question is if SPI should still have the option to
> support imports? Or maybe don't have it OOTB, but if customers start
> asking for pagination, we have the option to say them "ok, we will try
> to add it" instead of "no, you can't do that and there is no way to
> support it with current SPI" .
>

Currently, the provider is responsible for implementing the import.  The 
SPI *requires* that import is implemented by hand by the developer.  The 
SPI *requires* a proxy which is also implemented by hand by the 
developer.  The provider is also responsible for implementing 
synchronization.  All this just to support pagination on the admin 
console page.

Also, pagination sucks already in our current implementation.  Consider 
a query that returns 1000 users, this would require importing those 1000 
users, before the pagination can even work.  I don't know what we were 
thinking!  It was such a bad idea....

Bill