How to count association size with waterline/sails? - many-to-many

Question

Using sails 0.10.5/waterline 0.10.15:
I cannot find an answer to a simple question: how to count the elements of an association without using populate() (which would load all data).
Let take a simple many2many relation with via:
User:
attributes: {
following: {
collection: 'user',
via: 'follower',
dominant: true
},
follower: {
collection: 'user',
via: 'following'
}
Now I need the size of the collections.
Currently I try
User.findById(1).populateAll().exec(function(err, user) {
// count of followings -> user.following.length;
// count of followers-> user.follower.length;
}
which leads to loading the collections.
I'm missing a count function at collection level to avoid population/loading of data.
Is there a possibility to access the (auto generated) join tables to run a count-query directly on the join?
Something like:
User.findById(1).count({'followings'}).exec(function(err, followings) {
...}
or
UserFollowingFollow_FollowFollowing.countByUserFollowingFollowId(1).
exec(function(err, followings) {
...}

Answer 1

Waterline does offer the count query method and it can be used like this to solve your problem:
User.count().where({follower: followerId})
.exec(function(err, numberOfFollowings) {
//numberOfFollowings will be the integer that you need
})
followerId is the id that you are passing to User.findOne() in your example.
You can also read the Waterline documentation about this.