An iterator object is the object created to access a virtual list of eDirectory objects. You use this iterator object to move around in the list and to retrieve data from the list. It provides list and search functionality similar to the NWDSList and NWDSSearch functions, but can deal with very large result sets.
For example, an application can display a scrollable listbox of 20 names from a large alphabetized virtual list of 100,000 eDirectory users. Because the server keeps the list in sorted order, the application needs to read only a small group of names for display at a time.
An application may also want to search a large eDirectory database for all users with the given name "Mary." NDS 8 allows this search to be done very efficiently, without having to examine every object in the database.