What exactly is "All" when handling webapp items in a collection?

Question

In reference to this documentation - http://docs.businesscatalyst.com/dev-assets/reference#!/how-tos/liquid/listing-and-filtering.html and also when using collections, Does All mean All or does it only list 500 items at a time? Also, what is the difference in performance speed when say looping through a collection vs using categories to display specific items. I have had webapps that contained around 70,000 items before, so I was curious.

Answer 1

Hey mate,
First thing is with collections etc I do not think pagination, fetching etc has been finished 100%, not much documentation either and on objects I have seen info on that change.
I have a forum post about pagination and things like collections and the use cases (that or I emailed the BC guys)
Basically covering like what I know is going through your head... You have a collection, so how do you iterate through the other pages, what happens when you want to show just 5 and no data etc.
BC limit is for performance and server reasons of course which is fine, but as you indicated you may want to display more so making another request to fetch the next chunk with API. You can do that with module_data but one of the issues I have raised and I can see happening is that if some of this core stuff is not covered on the core modules - All the work to update BC modules would end up being a waste of time, because if things like this crop up you would just end up using module_data for nearly everything as the API's role out. Which of course is OTT.