Federation - Item count

Hello, I've created a federated ItemType to pull in data from an ODBC data source and it seems to be working great apart from one thing: When running a search the status bar at the bottom reports '0 items found', and consequently you can't page through the results. 25 results do actually appear on screen though! Looking at the results in AML Studio I can't see any difference between what my onGet returns and the results of any other query on a normal native ItemType, so I'm not sure how I'm supposed to communicate the number of results (and page number) to the UI. To save uploading all my code, my results are assembled by:

• Create inn.newItem("my federated type")
• Set attributes and properties
• Get AML of new Item and append to string
• Repeat this for all results
• Strip the isNew and isTemp attributes from the AML
• Wrap in <Result> tags
• Return via inn.newItem().LoadAML(mystring);

This is probably the most roundabout way of assembling a result set but I couldn't find any better way that worked at least as far as I've got. Any pointers to documentation on how to do this better, or ideas on how to handle the item count gratefully received. Many thanks in advance, Ben ps. We're on V11 SP5