832936 - [Contacts] mozContacts API should provide a method to easily retrieve how many contacts we have without requesting the contacts list

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: DOM: Device Interfaces, defect)

Description

[alberto.pastor]

In some cases would be useful just retrieve the number of contacts, without retrieving the whole list. If that request is fast enough, I can think on several applications of that method.

No idea if that would be easily included in an standardization process.

Comment 1

[alberto.pastor]

CC'ing Gregor and Jonas.

Thoughts?

Comment 2

[Gregor Wagner [:gwagner]]

(In reply to Alberto Pastor from comment #0)
> In some cases would be useful just retrieve the number of contacts, without
> retrieving the whole list. If that request is fast enough, I can think on
> several applications of that method.
> 
> No idea if that would be easily included in an standardization process.

We (bent, sicking reuben and me) had a long discussion about the contacts API performance on Friday.
I am not 100% convinced that our idea we came up with will actually work but we definitely want to improve the current situation and add cursors and a count function.

Comment 3

[alberto.pastor]

Attachment: Pointer to Github pull request: https://github.com/mozilla-b2g/gaia/pull/7774

Pointer to Github pull-request

Comment 4

[alberto.pastor]

Knowing if there are no contacts in the DB would help to include some features.

Comment 5

[Alex Keybl [:akeybl]]

(In reply to Alberto Pastor [:albertopq] from comment #4)
> Knowing if there are no contacts in the DB would help to include some
> features.

What features? Required features? Please list bugs impacted with a renom.

Comment 6

[Mounir Lamouri (:mounir)]

It is not clear to me which use cases would work better with knowing how many contacts are currently in the DB. Comment 4 is about knowing if there are no contacts in the DB which isn't the same as knowing how many they are...

Comment 7

[Reuben Morais [:reuben]]

Alberto, can you clarify the use cases you have in mind here? See comment 6.

Comment 8

[alberto.pastor]

- As Mounir said, checking if you have no contacts for not showing the button "Add to existing contact", for example. I think it makes more sense 
- Any app that want to display the number of contacts without requesting them.
- Pre calculate list containers height for making rendering faster

I don't think is a must, but a nice to have at some point. That's the reason I created a bug for tracking it.

Comment 9

[alberto.pastor]

Ups, the first point was truncated:

- As Mounir said, checking if you have no contacts for not showing the button "Add to existing contact", for example. I think it makes more sense having a "getCount" that an API for knowing if you have no contacts, but is only an opinion from a developer perspective.

Comment 10

[Jonas Sicking (:sicking) No longer reading bugmail consistently]

I agree that getting the count sounds more useful, and no more complicated to implement or use, than exposing simply "are there contacts or not".

Comment 11

[Reuben Morais [:reuben]]

Attachment: Add getCount

Comment 12

[Reuben Morais [:reuben]]

Attachment: Implement getCount

Comment 13

[Reuben Morais [:reuben]]

Attachment: Test getCount

Comment 14

[Reuben Morais [:reuben]]

Thanks!

https://hg.mozilla.org/projects/birch/rev/2c19b63b23d9

Comment 15

[Ryan VanderMeulen [:RyanVM]]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/2c19b63b23d9