HEAD vs GET for total count-CodePudding

What's the better option HEAD or GET? I need to return total count of entities. I've seen a lot of opinions, but not sure what is the most effective. Also not sure if it does make sense to return an Int in the response body or not.

Can HEAD method expect parameters? I ask because the count may be extended in the future with some additional parameters, such as return count of entities which matches the condition I.e. user can pass parameter startsWith etc.

CodePudding user response：

In case of HEAD, you expect server not to send any body, only response headers. In that case you would have to put total count value as custom response header. Performance wise it will not make a big difference. It will be easier for you to handle GET with int in body I think.

CodePudding user response：

If you are expecting to receive a representation of the resource, use GET. If you are expecting only to receive HTTP metadata about the resource, use HEAD.

The HEAD method is identical to GET except that the server MUST NOT send content in the response. HEAD is used to obtain metadata about the selected representation without transferring its representation data, often for the sake of testing hypertext links or finding recent modifications. -- HTTP Semantics 9.3.2

For you, expecting to return data in the body of the response, the correct method to use is GET

GET /count

200 OK
Content-Type: application/json

2

HEAD /count

200 OK
Content-Type: application/json