I recently found out that the Azure DevOps Graph API documentation is somewhat confusing regarding its description of when and where to expect continuation tokens when performing API calls.

As an example, lets say you call the groups API:

https://vssps.dev.azure.com/{account name}/_apis/graph/groups?api-version=4.1-preview.1

The documentation will mention that if the data can not be “returned in a single page”, the “result set” will contain a continuation token. It turns out that the definitions of a single page and result set are both not entirely intuitive.

To start with the latter a result set in this case is not only the resulting JSON document as you might expect, but also the response headers of the API call. To be precise, the
x-ms-continuationtoken response header will contain the continuation token if one is needed to retrieve the next page.

The definition of a page in this API is also somewhat strange. In our account I received 495 results in the first page and 66 in the second (and last page) for a call to the above API without any filtering. When I apply filtering however (for instance, I want only the AAD groups) I receive 33 items in the first page and 5 in the second (and again last page).

Lessons learned: look everywhere for that continuation token even if the number of results doesn’t lead you to believe that it is a full page.