Add support for count operations whereever there is a list operation

[elbosso]

Description of the problem, including code/CLI snippet

I tried to emulate Githubs dynamic Badges using Apache, mod_python and python-gitlab. However, the building of a badge - for example showing the number of closed issues - is almost unbearably slow even when there are only 100 or so - using the naive approach to call list ant then count the returned elements (https://gist.github.com/elbosso/4f3bb0fb95dd1dc499cd46db422900bf).

However - the Gitlab API offers a possibility to count Objects - you simply have to do a fetch operation with pagination and setting the per_page parameter to 1 - the list operation still gives you a result and in that result there is the header X-Total - telling the total number of matching items for the given query. So we have an operation counting items matching a query that runs in constant time.

Example with curl:

 curl -i --header 'Private-Token: xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxx' 'http://<gitlab-host>/api/v4/projects/<project-id>/issues?state=closed&scope=all&per_page=1' 2>/dev/null

Expected Behavior

It would be nice if this kind of behaviour could be somehow added - maybe as add-on to the CRUD-Mixin?

I think, one would only need to support the v4 API here

Thanks for considering this - regards,

Juergen Key

[gpocentek]

Hi @elbosso

You can use the as_list=False parameter to get the info you're looking for when listing items. See the pagination docs: https://python-gitlab.readthedocs.io/en/stable/api-usage.html#pagination

For now we only support GET requests but we could implement HEAD requests to only retrieve the metadata and not the objects.

[elbosso]

Thank you very much - i did not see this in the documentation and dove head over heels into the api examples where this was not mentioned. It is exactly what i was looking for: my dynamic badges are now using as_list and the performance is marvelous. Thanks again - I am closing this issue now...