In my Google App Engine app I need to fetch and return a potentially large number of entities from a datastore query in response to a service call GET request. This call may return potentially thousands of entities and MBs of serialized data.
The first portion of the response packet communicates how many entities are in the serialized results, followed by all of the serialized entities. Currently I am iterating through all the entities in the query with a QueryResultIterator up to a maximum page size limit, after which I return a cursor from which can be used to continue fetching where the previous call left off (if the maximum was reached and there are still results in the query). As I iterate through the results, I save them in a list. Once I've either exhausted the query results or reached the maximum page size, I can then get the number of entities from the size of this list. But then I have to iterate through this list again to serialize each of the entities and write the results to the response output stream.
I don't know that this is the most efficient method to perform this operation. Is there a way I can get the number of entities in a query's results before actually iterating through them all or fetching them directly into a list? (The list method doesn't work anyway because I'm using cursors, which requires the use of QueryResultIterator).
QueryResultIterator has a method getIndexList(). Would this be a less costly way to get the number of entities in the query's results? I'm assuming this list would contain exactly one index object for each entity in the query's results. Also, I'd need this list to only contain the indexes for the entities after the current cursor position for the interator. Is my understanding correct or would this method not do what I think it would?
A list of just indexes would require much less memory than loading a list of whole entities. Although, I don't know if this list would be limited at all by the query's prefetch or chunk sizes, or if I'd want to use the query's limit parameter at all because I would only be interested in knowing how many entities were in the results up to the maximum page size plus one (to know there are still more results and provide a cursor to continue).
Currently I'm setting the prefetch and chunk size (to the size of my page limit), but I'm not using the limit or offset parameters since I'm using cursors instead. From what I understand cursors are preferable to offset/limit. Would setting the limit parameter affect continuing a query with a cursor?
Clearly I have quite a few questions as to how GAE datastore queries work and how they're affected by changing parameters. So any insights are appreciated. The documentation for App Engine APIs is often sparse, as in one sentence descriptions of methods stating pretty much what can be deduced from the method signature. They don't generally go into much detail otherwise. Maybe the way I'm doing it currently is just fine after all. It works as is, but I'm trying to optimize the service call to get the best response time possible for my client application.
UPDATE: By the way, I am using Objectify v3 in my app and to perform this query. There are several places I am required to use the low-level datastore API, including to do geo-location queries (with geomodel) and projection queries (which aren't support in Objectify v3). So if there is a good way to do this using Objectify, that would be ideal. Otherwise I can use the low-level API, but it's always messier this way.
