On 1/6/11 7:02 PM, Alex Karasulu wrote:
On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 6:26 PM, Emmanuel Lecharny<[email protected]>wrote:

Hi,

today, while tracking some issue in the server, I jumped into some code in
the ExceptionInterceptor that I find questionable. Let me explain something
we already discussed on IRC.


You know I thought about this to a degree after our conversations. I think
the Cursor is setup to be automatically positioned on the first element if
one exists. This is why we are checking if an element is available. So
calling available() might be the right thing to do and makes sense.
Yep. And t's the only way to go (see the mail I just sent).
Although I have no idea how to have the available() method return the correct info.

So even inside a block of code inside an interceptor after Cursor creation
it might check if the underlying candidate has elements available before
wrapping it or even adding its own filter.
This part of the code is like the dark side of the moon for me...

When we go up the chain, and process the ExceptionInterceptor, the
following code is executed :
    public EntryFilteringCursor search( NextInterceptor nextInterceptor,
SearchOperationContext searchContext )
    {
        EntryFilteringCursor cursor = nextInterceptor.search( searchContext
);

        // Check that if the cursor is empty, it's not because the DN is
invalid.
        if ( !cursor.available()&&  !searchContext.getDn().isEmpty()&&
!subschemSubentryDn.equals( searchContext.getDn()) )
        {
            // We just check that the entry exists only if we didn't found
any entry
            assertHasEntry( searchContext, "Attempt to search under
non-existant entry:", searchContext.getDn() );
        }

        return cursor;
    }

The assertHasEntry method is :

    private void assertHasEntry( OperationContext opContext, String msg, DN
dn ) throws LdapException
    {
        if ( !opContext.hasEntry( dn, ByPassConstants.HAS_ENTRY_BYPASS ) )
        {
            throw new LdapNoSuchObjectException( msg + dn.getName() );
        }
    }

And now, the problem : the cursor.available() call *always* return false,
thus we most of the case do a lookup, which is costly. Every single search
we do will always fetch N+1 entry : The N entry to return, plus the first
entry a second time.


Hmmm why does it return the first entry a second time?

It does not return the first entry a second time. What it does is that it read the first entry to see if it exists, and if so, the process continues and later, while transmitting the SearchResult, we read the first entry again. So the first entry is read twice.

This is useless.


Yes it should not do this.


The reason why this check is being done is that we need to send a
LDAP_NO_SUCH_OBJECT result if there is no entry returned.

We discussed some options we have. Currently, we have 2 :
- make the cursor return something different from false if there is an
entry, even if we don't prefetch the entry.
- postpone this test and handle the case in the SearchHandler

Option #1 implies a huge refactoring of the cursor API. Not sure we want to
do this
Option #2 is probably better. We just have to check that it's valid to
check for the absence of an entry if the candidate have been discarded by
some upper filter (for instance, if we rejected some entry because the ACIs
mandated it). In this case, should we send back a LDAP_NO_SUCH_OBJECT?

I will experiment with Option #2, re-read the RFC, and update you.

What worries me is that this worked just fine for years. It should not be
failing us now: there has to be something wrong here. I can take a look at
the code and maybe we can discuss this more together on IRC.
It works. It's just that it's not efficient. I removed the cursor.next() and replaced it by a cursor.available(), expecting the server to avoid fetching the first entry twice, but sadly, as available() returns false until the entry is fetched, we still fetch the entry twice...

Btw, see my second mail for the reason why we have to handle this a the cursor level, not on the SearchHandler level.


--
Regards,
Cordialement,
Emmanuel Lécharny
www.iktek.com

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