How to Get Size of an Element/List in Firebase Without Get It All

How to get size of an element/list in Firebase without get it all?

Firebase doesn't have a count operator, so the only way is to download all children or keep a separate <children>_count property in sync. The latter is not a trivial task (see my answer here for one approach and this example Cloud Function), so most often developers likely end up going with the downloads-too-much-data-but-is-trivial approach:

ref.child("messages").on("value", function(snapshot) {
  console.log("There are "+snapshot.numChildren()+" messages");
})

A more efficient way to count the children would be to fire a REST call with shallow=true parameter, which will give you just the keys. See In Firebase, is there a way to get the number of children of a node without loading all the node data?

Firestore query get size of results without reading the documents?

With so many products I plan to paginate the results of query as I get the documents.

That's a very good decision since getting 10000-20000 foods (documents) at once is not an option. Reason one is the cost, it will be quite expensive and second is that you'll get an OutOfMemoryError when trying to load such enormous amount of data.

The issue is that I need to know the amount of results to display the total of results to the user.

There is no way in Firestore so you can know in advance the size of the result set.

Is there a way of getting the number of results for a query without getting all the documents.

No, you have to page through all the results that are returned by your query to get the total size.

But in this example they say to use a counter which doesn't seem practical as I am using a query on keyword when the user searches

That's correct, that solution doesn't fit your needs since it solves the problem of storing the number of all documents in a collection and not the number of documents that are returned by a query. As far as I know, it's just not scalable to provide that information, in the way this cloud hosted, NoSQL, realtime database needs to "massively scale".

In Firebase, is there a way to get the number of children of a node without loading all the node data?

The code snippet you gave does indeed load the entire set of data and then counts it client-side, which can be very slow for large amounts of data.

Firebase doesn't currently have a way to count children without loading data, but we do plan to add it.

For now, one solution would be to maintain a counter of the number of children and update it every time you add a new child. You could use a transaction to count items, like in this code tracking upvodes:

var upvotesRef = new Firebase('https://docs-examples.firebaseio.com/android/saving-data/fireblog/posts/-JRHTHaIs-jNPLXOQivY/upvotes');
upvotesRef.transaction(function (current_value) {
  return (current_value || 0) + 1;
});

For more info, see https://www.firebase.com/docs/transactions.html

UPDATE:
Firebase recently released Cloud Functions. With Cloud Functions, you don't need to create your own Server. You can simply write JavaScript functions and upload it to Firebase. Firebase will be responsible for triggering functions whenever an event occurs.

If you want to count upvotes for example, you should create a structure similar to this one:

{
  "posts" : {
    "-JRHTHaIs-jNPLXOQivY" : {
      "upvotes_count":5,
      "upvotes" : {
      "userX" : true,
      "userY" : true,
      "userZ" : true,
      ...
    }
    }
  }
}

And then write a javascript function to increase the upvotes_count when there is a new write to the upvotes node.

const functions = require('firebase-functions');
const admin = require('firebase-admin');
admin.initializeApp(functions.config().firebase);

exports.countlikes = functions.database.ref('/posts/$postid/upvotes').onWrite(event => {
  return event.data.ref.parent.child('upvotes_count').set(event.data.numChildren());
});

You can read the Documentation to know how to Get Started with Cloud Functions.

Also, another example of counting posts is here:
https://github.com/firebase/functions-samples/blob/master/child-count/functions/index.js

Update January 2018

The firebase docs have changed so instead of event we now have change and context.

The given example throws an error complaining that event.data is undefined. This pattern seems to work better:

exports.countPrescriptions = functions.database.ref(`/prescriptions`).onWrite((change, context) => {
    const data = change.after.val();
    const count = Object.keys(data).length;
    return change.after.ref.child('_count').set(count);
});

```