Ideas for Arc XP

Hi Manuel,

Thank you for submitting this idea, and for the detail in your support ticket.

The Arc XP Author Service uses cursor-based pagination by design. The API is intentionally stateless: it doesn't track where any particular caller is in a traversal. Adding a native previous cursor would require Arc XP to maintain per-session traversal history on the server side for the Author Service's database and architecture design - which is the kind of stateful, per-caller bookkeeping that cursor-based systems are specifically designed to avoid for scalability reasons.

That said, your service is the right place to own this state, and the pattern for doing so is well-established:

As your integration fetches pages forward, store the last value from each response in a session record (keyed by user, sort config, or a session token) in front-end, but since you're doing service/back-end integration that state needs to live in a state management (agent session, local json file, redis, db...). When the agent wants to navigate backward, your service looks up the stored cursor for the requested page and re-fetches it from Arc XP. One extra Arc XP API call per backward navigation. This is the standard pattern that is not very Arc-specific design. It is used by GitHub, Stripe, Shopify and other cursor-based APIs.

We understand the previous support response suggested using "command-line call history," which missed the mark for your use case. The cursor session approach above is the production-grade pattern for server-side integrations with cursor-based APIs.

To be direct about the feature request: we will not be adding a previous cursor to the Author API. The architectural cost of making Arc XP stateful per-session is not justified for this use case, and the workaround above fully solves the problem at the integration layer.