Performance enhancing tips with reader access controlled documents
The following are some tips for making applications/views that perform well even with reader access controlled documents:
- Embedded view using Show Single Category. This is the winner, hands down. If your data is structured so that users can see all the documents in a category, then you can display just the contents of that category very quickly to the user. In some cases, it may make sense to let the user switch categories, in which case you have to consider whether or not he can see the contents of the other categories. But in most cases, the view would be something like My Sales and would show all the sales documents for the current user. The caveat for this kind of view is that the user interface for the Notes client is not quite as nice as the native view display. For Web browsers, it is just as good, and we have never seen a reason not to use this kind of view for Web browser applications. In fact, the performance is so good that it’s faster to open one of these with reader access controlled documents than to open a native view without reader access controlled documents!
- Local Replicas. For a sales tracking database, many companies use local replication to ensure that their sales reps can use the database when disconnected. This is a great solution in many ways, but reader access controlled documents can be tricky when their Reader Names values change, and they need to disappear from some local replicas and appear on others.
- Shared, Private on first use views. This is an elegant solution for Notes clients, but there are some drawbacks. First, it cannot be used for browsers. Second, the views need either to be stored locally, which can be problematic for some customers, or on the server, which can be a performance and maintenance problem of its own. Third, as the design of the application changes, it can be tricky updating the design of these (now) private views. And fourth, some customers have experienced performance problems, which may be related to having large numbers of these private views being created and used.
- Categorized views. As seen in Figure 3, categorized views can be very fast to open with respect to Reader Names. They are bigger and slower to index, but typically they eliminate the Reader Names performance issue. The real caveat here is that users may find these views to be unfriendly, a label no one wants to have on their application.
The final tip concerns something to avoid. The feature “Don’t show empty categories” could, in theory, be used very successfully with the preceding tip to make a categorized view that would only display the categories containing documents that a user can see. However, in practice, it will result in a view with performance characteristics akin to a flat view, so it is probably a feature to avoid if performance is important.
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