[OASIS Issue Tracker] Created: (CMIS-188) Should it be optional tosupport "getDescendants" with an arbitrary "depth"?

Should it be optional to support "getDescendants" with an arbitrary "depth"?
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                 Key: CMIS-188
                 URL: http://tools.oasis-open.org/issues/browse/CMIS-188
             Project: OASIS Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) TC
          Issue Type: Bug
            Reporter: Ethan Gur-esh
            Priority: Minor


The current definition of the "getDescendants" method can take in 3 values for the "depth" parameter:
* 1: Which behaves like GetChildren
* -1: Which gets ALL descendants, regardless of depth
* [2..n]: Which gets ONLY decendants up to the depth level specified.

But I'm not sure that many repositories can handle the [2..n] case very efficiently. (E.g. in SharePoint the native data tables make this query non-trivial to execute, even though the "-1" and "1" cases are very efficient.)

Should we provide a way for repositories to say that they don't support getting an arbitrary depth of children? Or maybe just remove that case, by saying that getChilren is ALWAYS with a depth of "-1" (i.e. remove the parameter entirely?)


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