People Search: "Total" field value is incorrect - causing issue with pagination

Question

MS Graph API : People Search endpoint is returning incorrect values in "Total" field of the response. This is causing a problem when Paging is enabled on PnP Modern Search webpart - people results use cases. We can observe this (incorrect) behavior for messages and bookmarks search endpoints as well.

For example, when searching for people (using graph explorer) for

Case 1: keyword "test", (without specifying any specific size) the total number of people returned are - 7

Case 2: keyword "test", (with specifying "3" size) to get 3 results per page. Issue is the "total" changed to 3 instead of actual 7.

Answer 1

Hello CF_Harsha,

Thanks for reaching out!

It is an expected behavior that you are getting different results while using different from and size using search query. The search results returned by the Microsoft Search API are based on the data available at the time of the search query. If the underlying data changes between different paginated requests, such as new documents being added or existing documents being updated or deleted, the search results may be different on subsequent pages.

Please refer to the documentation for more details.

Hope this helps.

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