Tips and tricks
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## Tips and tricks

This is currently a ragbag of things to consider. It will hopefully be more structured at a later time.

### Paging output

If you run commands like getref that are likely to return more information than fits on a screen, you can either try to parse the result in your program and then display it chunk-wise. You may have to parse the data anyway for a different reason, so this option may come at no extra cost. However, if you just want to display the data, you can also use the server-side paging which is implemented in all "get*" commands. These commands take an optional limit argument. The general format is `limit[:offset]`. `limit` is the number of datasets to display, and the optional `offset` is the number of references to skip at the beginning. That is, asking refdbd to limit the result set to 5:10 will cause it to ignore the first 10 datasets and send datasets 11 through 15. You can use this in a loop to retrieve the datasets in groups of 5 until no more datasets are available. Server-side paging is preferable in all cases where a query may return lots of data, as you don't have to buffer them locally.

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