As a developer, the REST API gives you control on how much of a returned collection you want to receive.
The collection returned by a simple request can contain a large number of entities. You can control the size of the list using pagination. So for example if a node with an id of e8680e58-0701-4b64-950d-66cce277fbc7 has 100 comments the following request will return a list of 100 entities:
nodes/e8680e58-0701-4b64-950d-66cce277fbc7/comments
You can get just the first 10 items using the maxItems parameter:
nodes/e8680e58-0701-4b64-950d-66cce277fbc7/comments?maxItems=10
You can then get the second page of 10 items using the skipCount parameter:
nodes/e8680e58-0701-4b64-950d-66cce277fbc7/comments?maxItems=10&skipCount=10
A returned list object will always contain a pagination object which has the following properties:
- skipCount
- An integer describing how many entities exist in the collection before those included in this list.
- maxItems
- The maxItems parameter used to generate this list, or if there was no maxItems parameter the default value, 10.
- count
- The number of objects in the entries array.
- hasMoreItems
- A boolean value which is true if there are more entities in the collection beyond those in this response. A true value means request with a larger value for the skipCount or the maxItems parameter will return more entities.
- totalItems
- An integer describing the total number of entities in the collection. The API may not be able to determine this value, in which case this property will not be present.