Gmail style "virtual" select all

[tfwright]

Currently the batch select UX only allows you to select at most all entries on a single page. In order to run some operation on every single record, you need to use a task instead of an action. This is fine for some things (e.g. "delete all") but is not suitable when you want to clean up some specific but large selection of records.

One potentially simple solution to this problem would be to simply allow the user to choose how many records are visible on a single page, and make "all" one of the options. In order to run a batch action on a large number, but not all records, they would enter search criteria that would identify all records and then select "all" to surface all matches on a page, and then use the select all checkbox to run the action on all of them. The main downside of this solution is potentially poor UX/performance when there are a lot of matches.

Another more robust solution would be to allow a second checkbox state for select all checkbox, activated on a second click instead of deselecting, which would mark all results for selection. The event handler would receive the query and find each result one at a time (in a stream?), running the action on each. Downsides of this solution are transparency and potentially poor query performance. Probably async execution would be required which reduces transparency and could potentially overload the db.

Either solution could possibly require some sort of hard limit to the number of matches that can be processed at a single time.

[tfwright]

Implemented via 00a5845