I'm not sure that chasing WebHints for those people on screen in People View would necessarily be satisfactory. Paging through a large dataset would trigger many requests to the providers, many of which would be ignored as the user has paged onwards, even before there are any results. Apart from the unwarranted load on the servers, the normally slow turning on of light bulbs is frustrating as you land on a new page. A simpler and, I think, better solution for providers and users is to enable WebHints in People View when the number of people in the view is below some limit, e.g., 100 people. Thus, after the usual delay and no matter what page subset of the 100 people, the hint bulbs are immediately displayed.
Even if your database is large, then any group whose size is below the limit will have WebHints in People View.
I suppose another controlled approach would be a manual button to "Get WebHints" in People View and it would request them for the 100 people starting from the top of the current page...
I think Tom's approach is quite reasonable - better than my suggestion. I often have groups that are less than 100 people. I might suggest going a bit larger than 100 people, but perhaps not too much larger. I often am getting hints for far more than 100 people in Descendant View when there are a lot of generations. RM slows down briefly when I first go to such a large Descendant View when hints are enabled, but it doesn't crash or become unusable or anything like that. So I think People View could handle hints for maybe a few hundred people at the same time but probably not for a few thousand people at the same time.
I think that Descendant View and People View have more in common than it seems, or perhaps I should suggest that they should have even more in common than they already do. A Descendant View automatically defines "a group of people" for you, where the "group criteria" doesn't have to be specified explicitly by you. And the "group criteria" of being a descendant is even dynamic. It's automatic if you add a descendant that they are in the view. I think the "group" defined by Descendant View is a good way to work with hints, a good way to work with FS matching, and those kinds of things. The only thing I don't like about Descendant View is that if you add a generation in order to see more people, it adds spouses and children. I really, really, really wish there were a way to "add a half generation" and only add the spouses without adding the children at the same time. I really wish I could have a couple of generations in People View, then add the spouses of the children, then add their children, then add the spouses of those children, etc. The extra granularity would be extremely helpful, and surely it wouldn't be very hard to do.
Jerry
