masarati@aero.polimi.it wrote:

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quanah@zimbra.com wrote:

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Full_Name: Quanah Gibson-Mount Version: NA OS: NA URL: ftp://ftp.openldap.org/incoming/ Submission from: (NULL) (75.111.45.108)

It would be extremely useful to have an extended operation that allows querying the number of children of a given (sub)tree, so that one can avoid iterating through the entire subtree to determine this number.

Might as well ask for the numSubordinates operational attribute to be implemented instead, this doesn't seem to merit a new exop. And for numSubordinates, see the -devel archives for why we chose not to implement it.

In either case, the server still needs to iterate over all entries internally, and the result has to take ACLs and entry disclosure into account.

An exop would allow to easily discriminate between intentional and "catchall" requests, like "+". Moreover, it might make sense to discriminate at least between subtree and onelevel number of subordinates; this would require two distinct operational attributes, or a parameter in the exop.

I'm not endorsing either solution, I'm just pointing out possible pros and cons.

If you want to be able to distinguish results based on scope then it makes more sense to just define a Search control. Like No-op - count the entries that would be returned, instead of returning them. (And bypassing the sizelimit too, but probably not bypassing timelimit.)