Why can't ContinuationToken be used for paging in Azure Search API?

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Reading the documentation for the Azure Search .NET SDK, I see that the ContinuationToken property is not supposed to used for pagination (this is the same as the @odata.nextLink and @search.nextPageParameter properties in the REST API).

Note that this property is not meant to help you implement paging of search results. You can implement paging using the Top and Skip search parameters. Source

Why can't I use it for pagination? I have a situation where I want to run a query and then step through a static copy of the results page by page. I don't want those query results to change beneath my feet, however, as I am navigating through them, as new documents are added to the underlying database. In my case, there could be hundreds or thousands of results that get added in the minute or two between submitting the initial query and navigating to another page. How could I accomplish this?

azure-cognitive-search azure
1 Answers

Your question can be addressed in two parts:

  1. Why is it not recommended to use ContinuationToken to implement pagination?
  2. How can pagination be implemented such that results remain completely stable from page to page?

These are actually unrelated questions, since nothing about ContinuationToken guarantees the stability of the search results. Azure Search makes no consistency guarantees around paging, whether you use $top and $skip or ContinuationToken.

For question #1, the reason ContinuationToken is not recommended for paging is that Azure Search controls when the token is returned, not your application code. If you make assumptions about how and when Azure Search decides to return you a token, there's a chance those assumptions may break with a future service update. The intent of ContinuationToken is to prevent requests for too many documents from overwhelming the service, so you should assume that it is entirely at the service's discretion whether it will return a token.

For question #2, since Azure Search doesn't provide consistency guarantees, you can't completely avoid issues like the same document showing up in multiple pages, missing documents, or documents that are deleted by the time they are seen in results. Even if you wanted to build your own snapshot of the results and page over them in your application code, building a consistent snapshot isn't possible in the first place. However, if your only concern is to avoid showing new documents in the results, you can include a created timestamp field in your index and filter on that in every search request.

Frankly, unless you're trying to export the entire contents of your index, I would question the need for such strong consistency guarantees around paging. Google and Bing make no such guarantees, so arguably user expectations are already set around this. If you are trying to export your data, this is unfortunately not easy with Azure Search today. In that case, please vote on this User Voice item to help the team prioritize this scenario.

Colonel_Kernel_31210
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