[IDEA] Present total items count in the list widget. We have it internally anyway. about tiddlywiki5

[rmunn]

There would be an interaction between this and the limit attribute. Currently even if limit is present, the list widget calculates the entire list anyway even if it's only going to show, say, the first 3 items. But I have some work planned in #7811 that would allow the list widget to be "lazy" and stop calculating list items once the limit is reached. In order for that to be possible, we'd need to define the interaction between total-count and limit to say "If limit is present, total-count will never be greater than limit, though of course it might be less." I.e. if you have five tiddlers tagged with Todo and you do <$list filter="[tag[Todo]]" limit=3 total-count="items"> then the value of items would become 3, not 5.

I believe this is what you would want anyway: in any scneario I've come up so far, you would want to know how many list items the list is actually going to display, not how many it potentially could have displayed. But it's definitely worth clarifying that iteraction now, before anyone actually encounters it in practice.

[saqimtiaz]

There are performance considerations to the proposal. See #5867 for a prior discussion that includes implementation ideas.

[AnthonyMuscio]

I do not have knowledge of the javascript but the existing feature "<counter-variable-name>-last is set to yes for the last entry in the list, no for the others" is theoretically already taking this into account.

[AnthonyMuscio]

@saqimtiaz I( need to leave performance considerations to others, but I would have thought the logic needed to provide the <counter-variable-name>-last would already have impacted the performance and making the total items only a matter of returning it.

• To not have this feature, the same filter needs to be run with a count operator to get the total which seems a more costly way

[saqimtiaz]

@AnthonyMuscio the reason for the performance impact is discussed in the linked issue.

[AnthonyMuscio]

@AnthonyMuscio the reason for the performance impact is discussed in the linked issue.

As I said, I looked and cant understand or provide any input.

[AnthonyMuscio]

I note that the existing count widget, and count operator may already have code in relation to the total items after the limit[] operator. thus may be related to any resulting fix.

[AnthonyMuscio]

I believe what I proposed is correct and I don't understand the arguments at the link I was directed to.

I have since stored the total count in behind a custom widget for list reports.