Total Count Support for Paginated LookupResources API

[adarshsingh2]

Problem

We're building a UI with paginated authorization resources, but users expect total counts (e.g., "Showing 1-20 of 150 groups"). The LookupResources API provides great cursor-based pagination but no total count information.

Current Workarounds

1. Fetch all pages - Expensive for large datasets
2. Estimate counts - Cache rough estimates, but may be stale
3. "Load More" pattern - No counts shown, less ideal UX

Questions

1. Is the absence of total counts intentional for performance/scale reasons?
2. Are there plans to add optional total count support (even if expensive/estimated)?
3. What's the recommended approach for UIs that need count information?

Use Case

• Enterprise app with 1000s of groups/documents
• UI needs: "Showing 1-20 of 150" with page navigation
• Performance requirement: < 2 second load times

Potential Solution

Optional fields in LookupResourcesResponse:

• total_count (when feasible)
• estimated_count + is_estimate flag
• include_total_count request parameter (opt-in)

Any guidance on SpiceDB's philosophy here would help with our architectural decisions. Thanks!

Environment: SpiceDB v1.24.0 via authzed-py

[josephschorr]

Unfortunately, this isn't really possible, outside of using Materialize (https://authzed.com/docs/authzed/concepts/authzed-materialize).

The only way to determine the total count is to fully calculate the results, which the callers can already do. This, of course, has performance implications as you mentioned and also requires the caller to either cache the full set of results themselves (and keep them updated) or have possibly-stale counts displayed.

This is, in fact, what Materialize does: it precomputes the results set(s) for the watched permission(s), so it has the data available more or less in real-time, and thus can answer these questions.

Our recommendation is to not display the (possibly stale) counts, but show a "Has More" indication until the end of the list is reached. Once a user has more than a few hundred results, it often becomes fairly useless for them to have the counts, outside of running something like a "report" (which can call the full LR and usually wait).