Server-side pagination for nodes action via WebSocket

[trxsh1DEV]

Feature Request: Server-side pagination for nodes action via WebSocket

Summary

When fetching devices programmatically via the WebSocket API using action: 'nodes', the server always returns all devices at once. The skip and limit fields sent in the payload are silently ignored, and msg.skip, msg.limit, and msg.totalcount in the response are always undefined.

This makes it impractical to build integrations for large MeshCentral deployments (thousands of nodes), since every request loads the full dataset into memory on both the server and the client.

---

Current Behavior

Sending the following payload:

{
  "action": "nodes",
  "skip": 100,
  "limit": 50,
  "responseid": "my-request-id"
}

Always returns all nodes regardless of skip and limit. The response never includes totalcount, skip, or limit fields.

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Expected Behavior

The server should honor skip and limit in the nodes action payload and return a paginated response:

{
  "action": "nodes",
  "skip": 100,
  "limit": 50,
  "totalcount": 1500,
  "nodes": { ... }
}

This would allow external scripts and integrations to iterate through devices page by page without loading everything at once.

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What I investigated

• skip / limit in payload — ignored by the server.
• maxDeviceView in config.json — limits the first response, but does not expose a way to request subsequent pages via script. There is no documented WebSocket action to fetch the next block programmatically.
• The maxDeviceView pagination appears to be designed for the web UI only, not for external API consumers.

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Use Case

I'm building a Node.js integration that periodically syncs MeshCentral devices with an external system. With ~1,000+ nodes, fetching everything on every sync is inefficient and puts unnecessary load on the server.

Server-side pagination via WebSocket would allow scripts to:

• Fetch devices incrementally (e.g., 100 at a time)
• Resume from a specific offset
• Retrieve totalcount to know how many pages to expect

---

Proposed API (suggestion)

Extend the existing nodes action to optionally accept skip and limit:

// Request
{ "action": "nodes", "skip": 0, "limit": 100, "responseid": "req-1" }

// Response
{
  "action": "nodes",
  "skip": 0,
  "limit": 100,
  "totalcount": 1500,
  "nodes": { ... }
}

If skip/limit are absent, the current behavior (return all) would be preserved for backward compatibility.

---

Environment

• MeshCentral version: 1.1.58
• Database: MongoDB

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Thank you for considering this. Happy to discuss or help test if needed!

[si458]

this feature already exists in the source code, the reason it gets ignored it because you have to enable it within the config.json

{
  "$schema": "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Ylianst/MeshCentral/master/meshcentral-config-schema.json",
  "domains": {
    "": {
      "maxDeviceView": 100
    }
  }
}

you set maxDeviceView to whatever the max number of records per page you want (in the example above only show 100 per page)
then meshcentral will use the skip and limit values in your nodes command

the limit however will only work UP TO the max value you set maxDeviceView too it wont go over, but it can be less

BUT we plan to redo the skip, limit, pagination in the future,
so you wont need this value and it can all be done in the browser or over the websocket