Hi - I am having a service which returns collection of users. However at times i need to return only count of collection, rather than the actual resources. How would i achieve the same using json api.
I know count is part of META while returning collection.
In this case
Appreciate your suggestions
If your service supports pagination query params you can send your request with a limit of 0. This would return no actual resources but the meta block should still contain any additional information about the collection such as the total.
For example:
GET /users?page[limit]=0
Might return:
{ "data": [], "meta": { "count": 100 } }
You might want to specify an include parameter so that your collection only has id & type attributes. This would lighten the response and allow you to use a generic endpoint. In your case, you’ll ignore the users collection and only concentrate on the meta data to get the count value.
I’ve done as @josh suggested. There’s nothing wrong with requesting a limit of zero. If you do not allow that, you can limit to 1 item; using include would reduce the data being returned.