Why does this OData query with $count=true return an object?

问题

I am trying to figure out how to correctly support returning the number of items in a (filtered) data set in my OData API.

My understanding is that adding the $count=true argument to the query string should allow for this.

Now, based on the example from the tutorial in the official docs, adding that parameter should cause the web API to return just an integer number:

The request below returns the total number of people in the collection.

GET serviceRoot/People?$count=true

Response Payload

20

On the other hand, this accepted and quite upvoted1 answer indicates that a query with $count=true will actually return an object, one of whose properties holds said integer number. It provides an exemplary query on a sample endpoint:

https://services.odata.org/V4/Northwind/Northwind.svc/Customers?$count=true&$top=0&$filter=Country eq 'Germany'

Indeed, the actual result from that endpoint is the complex object

{
  "@odata.context": "https://services.odata.org/V4/Northwind/Northwind.svc/$metadata#Customers",
  "@odata.count": 11,
  "value": []
}

instead of the expected result of a single integer number

11

Why is this? Am I misunderstanding the documentation?

¹: The answer had 25 upvotes at the time of writing.

来源：https://stackoverflow.com/questions/61319024/why-does-this-odata-query-with-count-true-return-an-object