What’s the best RESTful method to return total number of items in an object?

Question

I’m developing a REST API service for a large social networking website I’m involved in. So far, it’s working great. I can issue GET, POST, P

Answer 1

Interesting discussion regarding Designing REST API for returning count of multiple objects: https://groups.google.com/g/api-craft/c/qbI2QRrpFew/m/h30DYnrqEwAJ?pli=1

As an API consumer, I would expect each count value to be represented either as a subresource to the countable resource (i.e. GET /tasks/count for a count of tasks), or as a field in a bigger aggregation of metadata related to the concerned resource (i.e. GET /tasks/metadata). By scoping related endpoints under the same parent resource (i.e. /tasks), the API becomes intuitive, and the purpose of an endpoint can (usually) be inferred from its path and HTTP method.

Additional thoughts:

1. If each individual count is only useful in combination with other counts (for a statistics dashboard, for example), you could possibly expose a single endpoint which aggregates and returns all counts at once.
2. If you have an existing endpoint for listing all resources (i.e. GET /tasks for listing all tasks), the count could be included in the response as metadata, either as HTTP headers or in the response body. Doing this will incur unnecessary load on the API, which might be negligible depending on your use case.