Show full topic option

[KT Walrus]

I'd like an option to show the full topic in a single page rather than automatically paginating the topic display.

The main reason for this is to be able to print the entire topic at one time but it would also let me use the browser's find operation on one page rather than using IPB's topic search. It also might be easier to read some topics if the entire topic is shown in one page.

I think an "ALL PAGES" link in the pagination links would be good for this.

[bfarber]

Would this be an admin-only option?

What if you had a huge site and had a topic with a million posts in it (yes, this happens). Would you really want your members to have the ability to view that whole topic on one page? What if 50 of them did that at the same time? Surely your server would be crashing from trying to handle such a large dataset all at once frequently.

[DawPi]

I made such mod, with nice limit setting.

Screens:
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[KT Walrus]

Would this be an admin-only option?

What if you had a huge site and had a topic with a million posts in it (yes, this happens). Would you really want your members to have the ability to view that whole topic on one page? What if 50 of them did that at the same time? Surely your server would be crashing from trying to handle such a large dataset all at once frequently.

You could always only support it on topics with less than 1000 (or some arbitrary number) replies. I'm really just trying to get a convenient way to print or archive a topic that spans multiple pages as well as easier topic search.

Maybe just a Printable Topic link that shows the entire topic using the Print CSS in a new browser window. I really doubt that it would be clicked on that often such that performance is much of a problem. For topics over 1000 replies, you could just show the first 1000 replies to the window with a Next link to show the next 1000 replies.

Or, have a Print Topic link that pops up a dialog that asks for whether you want the entire topic printed or just a range of posts/replies (like Print Dialogs that allow you to choose what pages should be printed). The dialog would use AJAX to retrieve the HTML for the page into a window and then actually send the window to the printer and then destroy the window. I'm not exactly sure what print capabilities JS has, but if you restricted it to only printing the topic, I don't think many people will try to print a million post topic.

[bfarber]

You could always only support it on topics with less than 1000 (or some arbitrary number) replies. I'm really just trying to get a convenient way to print or archive a topic that spans multiple pages as well as easier topic search.

Maybe just a Printable Topic link that shows the entire topic using the Print CSS in a new browser window. I really doubt that it would be clicked on that often such that performance is much of a problem. For topics over 1000 replies, you could just show the first 1000 replies to the window with a Next link to show the next 1000 replies.

Or, have a Print Topic link that pops up a dialog that asks for whether you want the entire topic printed or just a range of posts/replies (like Print Dialogs that allow you to choose what pages should be printed). The dialog would use AJAX to retrieve the HTML for the page into a window and then actually send the window to the printer and then destroy the window. I'm not exactly sure what print capabilities JS has, but if you restricted it to only printing the topic, I don't think many people will try to print a million post topic.

Maybe not, but it would only take a couple of "accidental" clicks on the link to take the server down. Or someone mad at you and hitting the link repeatedly (DOS attack, effectively). Print almost does what you are saying now, but it limits to 300 instead of 1000. Pagination is something we'd like to look into (we have an open bug report on the print cutoff).