[pmwiki-users] Default max count for (:pagelist:)

[christian.ridderstrom at gmail.com]

I would like to suggest that we introduce a default max count for 
(:pagelist:). The reason is that I was just debugging a problem where some 
pagelist-directive on a page returned way to many pages. If I'd known 
which directive it was, I could of course have added 'count=...', but as I 
didn't it was quite tedious.

Today, an unsuspecting author might write "(:pagelist:)" on a page, and 
end up totally sinking the page. For instance, this page

 	http://pmwiki.org/wiki/Test/PagewithOnlyPagelist

takes quite a while to show so you end up thinking something is wrong. 
(And on my old laptop, the browser freezes for a while due to the size of 
the page).

So primarily because it is so easy to by mistake generate an exceedingly 
long list of pages, I think it should be possible to have a default 
maximum count for pagelist. This can be done in several ways of course:

* Introduce a separate variable, $PagelistMaxCount, that controls
   the maximum number of entries pagelist may ever generate. This would be
   regardless of what 'count=n' says.

* Introduce a separate variable, $PagelistDefaultMaxCount, that is
   basically equivalent to a default value for 'count=n'. The author
   can then override this with 'count=100000' if he wants that many pages.

Then there's the question of what to do when pagelist wants to list more 
pages than it can. I think that if it's a default limit that is active, 
then pagelist should probably output a special message at the end of the 
list. It could say something like:

 	More pages match this list criteria, see [[PmWiki/PageLists#more]]
  	for details.

On the other hand, if the directive contains an explicit 'count=n', I'm 
less inclined to like that such a message is shown. So perhaps pagelist 
should have a flag that controls if the "more"-message is shown or not.

What do you think?

/C

-- 
Christian Ridderström, +46-8-768 39 44               http://www.md.kth.se/~chr