Richard ... while openacs.org was down for upgrade this weekend I worked on pagination for the forums package, using list builder, and now understand it thoroughly.
I also understand how to make it paginate very quickly, and think I can hack it up to do so without having to modify any of the client code.
I think this will make use of Jon's pagination code unnecessary, i.e. we'll want to recommend use of list builder and deprecate use of the existing paginator.
The reason it's so slow now is that it uses the paginator but inefficiently. Rather than go into endless details I think I'll just fix it.
I would actually like to investigate writing a version of list builder that combines the multirow functionality afterwards. The current mechanism - call a list builder proc which then sets global structures for magic tcl procs you call embedded in .xql files to modify your query in ways that fit the needs of the listtemplate tag - seems like a gawdawful kludge to me. By combining the functionality it could, among other things, do reasonably efficient pagination using the display query itself wrapped appropriately in LIMIT/OFFSET rather than require a separate prepare-for-pagination query as is necessary now.
