How paging works in TaxonAPI

Some of the responses to calls may exceed a size that a publisher wishes to issue in one chunk or is reasonable for the client to receive. Some methods therefore implement paging. These methods accept two parameters to subset the total result.

Paging assumes sorting

All paging must assume sorting i.e. requesting a subset of a set of results by index value assumes that different calls to the same method produce results in the same order. It would be no good if the pages of a book were in different orders each time it was opened! For this reason all result sets are assumed to be sorted by object ID i.e. the TaxonName ID or TaxonConcept ID. It doesn't matter what the ordering is as long it is consistent.

-- RogerHyam - 24 Nov 2005