Nate; [folder level security to speed up data library loading]
My suggestion would be a solution somewhere in the middle. The ability to have per-dataset permissions is something that I think we should retain, but we could change our current policy of checking the permissions of the entire library at every load. Instead, it could work like this:
1. Check permissions on the library. 2. Check permissions on the first level contents of the library. 3. When a folder is expanded to show its contents, check the permissions of that folder's contents via AJAX.
The reason we didn't do this originally was to prevent folders from showing up if a user didn't have permission to access any of the datasets in that folder. But this can be worked around by setting access permission on the folder itself.
This is probably a fair amount of work, though, since it means not loading subfolder contents at page load since we are not checking their security until later.
Agreed, the AJAX loading would be ideal and allow you to maintain full permissions. This would also allow scaling up to arbitrarily large data libraries, as long as they are nested within folders. It did look like a pretty big project upon digging into the code, but any modifications that allow larger libraries would definitely be appreciated. Thanks, Brad