title: What’s the best RESTful method to return total number of items in an object?
body: <p>I'm developing a REST API service for a large social networking website I'm involved in. So far, it's working great. I can issue <code>GET</code>, <code>POST</code>, <code>PUT</code> and <code>DELETE</code> requests to object URLs and affect my data. However, this data is paged (limited to 30 results at a time).</p>
  <p>What would be the best RESTful way to get the total number of say, members, via my API?</p>
  <p>Currently, I issue requests to a URL structure like the following:</p>
  <ul>
  <li><strong>/api/members</strong> - Returns a list of members (30 at a time as mentioned above)</li>
  <li><strong>/api/members/1</strong> - Affects a single member, depending on request method used</li>
  </ul>
  <p>My question is: how would I then use a similar URL structure to get the total number of members in my application? Obviously requesting just the <code>id</code> field (similar to Facebook's Graph API) and counting the results would be ineffective given only a slice of 30 results would only be returned.</p>