Why are Views count from the API returning random results with null values?

Question

Why are Views count from the API returning randomly results with null values?

Answer

When calling the Views endpoint and requesting a count, as in /api/v2/views/count_many?ids= or /api/v2/views/{VIEW_ID}/count.json it can result with null values.

{
    "url":  "https://{SUBDOMAIN}.zendesk.com/api/v2/views/360175165913/count.json",
    "view_id":  360175165913,
     "value":  null,
     "pretty":  "...",
     "fresh":  false,
     "refresh":  "pubsub",
     "channel":  "view/924bf601a81d8a1be7aafb25c39eda0a999779f5/count",
     "poll_wait":  30
},

The underlying cause is that the system has yet to cache the data, resulting in the "fresh" attribute resulting a false value.

A solution for this is to implement a backoff strategy, where the requests are sent at intervals and keep retrying after many seconds, until the value is no longer null. It's worth mentioning that the endpoint is limited to 6 requests every 5 minutes.

For more information, see this article: Count tickets in view.