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Fire Arrow Server 1.8.2

· 2 min read
Till Gerken
Till Gerken
CTO

Fire Arrow Server 1.8.2 has been released.

  • (feature) Support _total search parameter in GraphQL

_total Parameter in GraphQL​

The FHIR _total search parameter was previously only honoured on the REST API. For GraphQL searches using stored (async) pagination, the count field — corresponding to Bundle.total — could be null on early pages because the total is only known once the asynchronous search task has loaded all results. Clients that needed a reliable total on the first page had to either poll until the search completed or switch to Cache-Control: no-store, which disables caching entirely.

Starting with 1.8.2, _total can be passed as an argument on any *Connection query:

ValueEffect
accurateForces a SELECT COUNT(*) alongside the main query. The total is persisted and available on every page.
estimatedRequests an estimated count (HAPI default behavior, implementation-dependent).
noneExplicitly suppresses count computation.
(omitted)Default behavior — count may be null until the async search completes.

Example:

{
  PatientConnection(_count: 10, name: "Smith", _total: "accurate") {
    count next edges { resource { id } }
  }
}

_total is excluded from encoded cursors, so it only needs to be specified on the initial query — subsequent pages retrieved via _cursor inherit the computed total automatically.

Note that _total has no effect on multi-alternative authorization searches where deduplication across alternatives makes the total unreliable; count stays null in that case regardless.