Catalogue > The Client/server solution and its consequences

To provide good performance even with large catalogues, perhaps with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of resources, the catalogue in cadett ELSA works with a so-called client/server solution. An active database server - Spider - handles the catalogue database where all data are stored. Searches, readings and writings are thus performed locally on the server and do not put a load to the network. The workstation sends a query or order to the server which is performing the work. This provides performance that is independent of the size of the catalogue and the number of concurrent users, to a larger degree than would otherwise be the case.

However, the technology has some other consequences as well, which are good to have some knowledge about.

When you open a catalogue, not all resources are displayed at once. Instead, the first 100 are loaded. This limitation exists, of course, to make the whole thing go so much faster.

If you scroll down and get to the last of the displayed resources, another 100 and so on will be loaded immediately. You can therefore effortlessly browse through all resources anyway, even if you will notice a slight delay every time a new chunk of resources is loaded.

The same applies when you set a filter. The first 100 resources that meet the filter criteria are loaded. Others appear when you scroll to the end of the list.

However, if for some reason you would like to force all items with the current filter to load, you can do so using the Load the entire catalogue command, which can be found in the Module pull-down menu.

If you have given this command, the catalogue will continue to load all resources from the entire catalogue during all operations that involve a new load, until you close the current catalogue or shut down cadett ELSA. That is inevitably slower when working with big catalogues.