Getting some data from Microsoft Graph unified OData endpoint - odata

Question

How to count number of items in EntitySet of MicrosoftGraph, for example 'users' or 'groups'? I tried:
https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/users?$count
Returns: lists all users
https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/users/$count
Returns:
{ "error": { "code": "Request_BadRequest", "message": "Unexpected segment Edm.Int32.", } }
Also in Annotations of target "microsoft.graph.directoryObject" which are those EntitySets based on I see that it is Selectable=false, Countable=false ...
Will $skip be ever available on 'users' or other toplevel EntitySet items ( https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/groups?$skip=5 ) ? It is available on other items ( https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me/contacts?$skip=5 ). I know about $skipToken, but it is not the same.
Can I find somewhere in the $metadata if property is sortable? For example user.displayName is sortable, but user.mail or user.givenName are not. This would be handy in the $metadata. Is there plan to introduce this into $metadata?
OrderBy DESC in this formula https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/users?$orderBy=displayName%20desc is ignored, it shows items ordered ASC, am I doing something wrong?

Answer 1

Not much help I know, but if you do an API call that gets a Collection you can get a count using the second form you gave in the first question. Eg:
https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/users/<id>/events/$count
returns the count (6 in my case, and not in JSON - the returned data is actually "\x{ef}\x{bb}\x{bf}6" (in Perl formatting)). If we use the ? as the last separator (which is what http://graph.microsoft.io/en-us/docs/overview/query_parameters seems to indicate we should) with this URL:
https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/users/<id>/events?$count
I just get the list of events with no count as you do.
So that seems to indicate two things to me:
a) The $count doesn't appear to work as a query parameter, despite the documentation and the OData standards saying it should,
and
b) There seems to be a bug in the API for handling EntitySets which isn't there for Collections.
Sorry I can't be of more help, but its another data point at least (I just came unstuck with the same thing which is why I noticed this StackOverflow post!)

Answer 2

Ad 1. https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/users/$count is the correct OData syntax (http://docs.oasis-open.org/odata/odata/v4.0/errata02/os/complete/part2-url-conventions/odata-v4.0-errata02-os-part2-url-conventions-complete.html#_Toc406398087), but as indicated in the metadata directoryObject collections are not currently countable. ODataV4 also allows $count in query parameters (http://docs.oasis-open.org/odata/odata/v4.0/errata02/os/complete/part2-url-conventions/odata-v4.0-errata02-os-part2-url-conventions-complete.html#_Toc406398166), but then it should be specified with true or false value (e.g. https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/me/events?$count=true) and the response will include both the collection and its count in the #odata.count property. This is again not supported for directoryObject collections.
Ad 2. There is no plan right now to support $skip for directoryObject collections.
Ad 3. Yes, we plan to indicate which properties are sortable by in metadata using the SortRestrictions annotation defined in the OData capabilities vocabulary (http://docs.oasis-open.org/odata/odata/v4.0/errata02/os/complete/vocabularies/Org.OData.Capabilities.V1.xml)
Ad 4. Your request is correct, but we only support sorting users by displayName in the ascending order.