looking for ideas/alternatives to providing a page/item count/navigation of items matching a GAE datastore query

Question

I like the datastore simplicity, scalability and ease of use; and the enhancements found in the new ndb library are fabulous.

As I understand datastore best practices, o

Answer 1

It all depends on how many results you typically get. E.g. by passing .count() a suitable limit you can provide an exact count if the #items is e.g. <= 100 and "many" if there are more. It sounds like you cannot pre-compute all possible counts, but at least you could cache them, thereby saving many datastore ops.

Using NDB, the most efficient approach may either be to request the first page of entities using fetch_page(), and then using the resulting cursor as a starting point for a count() call; or alternatively, you may be better off running the fetch() of the first page and the count() concurrently using its async facilities. The second option may be your only choice if your query does not support cursors. Most IN / OR queries don't currently support cursors, but they do if you order by __key__.

In terms of UI options, I think it's sufficient to offer next and previous page options; the "Gooooooogle" UI that affords skipping ahead several pages is cute but I almost never use it myself. (To implement "previous page", reverse the order of the query and use the same cursor you used for the current page. I'm pretty sure this is guaranteed to work.)