Add category counts for search results

[LukeWH]

Would it be possible to add a list of categories and the number of snaps found for each category to search results?

The use-case is for the upcoming Flutter Ubuntu Software, discussion here [1].

I see this working in 1 of 2 ways:

1. If the "categories" field is included in the request parameters.
2. If a separate parameter is sent, such as "category_counts".

Either way an additional node at the top level of the search results could be added:
{
  ...
  "categories": [
    {
       "name": "education",
       "title": "Education",
       "results": 10
    }
  ]
}

Obviously this is all made up and the implementation details may require some different output.

[1] https://github.com/ubuntu/app-store/issues/557

[Bowen Fan (bowenfan)]

Hi Luke, I've done some investigation on how we can do this in the backend, and created a Jira ticket here for tracking https://warthogs.atlassian.net/browse/SN-1392.

Adding this feature would basically transfer the frontend client load described in the github ticket to our servers, so some discussion within the team is needed before we can commit it for development.

Thanks!