Working With Large Lists in the SEAM Tool

As your site starts to accumulate a large number of principals and policies, the time it takes the SEAM Tool to load and display the principal and policy lists will become increasingly longer. Thus, your productivity with the tool will decrease. There are several ways to work around this problem.

First, you can completely eliminate the time to load the lists by not having the SEAM Tool load the lists. You can set this option by choosing Properties from the Edit menu, and unchecking the Show Lists field. Of course, when the tool doesn't load the lists, it can't display the lists, and you can no longer use the list panels to select principals or policies. Instead, you must type a principal or policy name in the new Name field that is provided, then select the operation that you want to perform on it. In effect, typing a name is equivalent to selecting an item from the list.

Another way to work with large lists is to cache them. In fact, caching the lists for a limited time is set as the default behavior for the SEAM Tool. The SEAM Tool must still initially load the lists into the cache. But after that, the tool can use the cache rather than retrieve the lists again. This option eliminates the need to keep loading the lists from the server, which is what takes so long.

You can set list caching by choosing Properties from the Edit menu. There are two cache settings. You can choose to cache the list forever, or you can specify a time limit when the tool must reload the lists from the server into the cache.

Caching the lists still enables you to use the list panels to select principals and policies, so it doesn't affect how you use the SEAM Tool as the first option does. Also, even though caching doesn't enable you to see the changes of other users, you can still see the latest list information based on your changes, because your changes update the lists both on the server and in the cache. And, if you want to update the cache to see other changes and get the lastest copy of the lists, you can use the Refresh menu whenever you want to refresh the cache from the server.