how to use CountingIterator to count records?

[Hunter Provyn]

I want to know the number of records a scanner has without actually 
getting the records from cloudbase.
I've been looking at CountingIterator (1.3.4), which has a getCount() 
method.  However, I don't know how
to access the instance to call getCount() on it because Cloudbase server 
just passes back the entries and doesn't expose the instance of the 
iterator.

It is possible to use an AggregatingIterator to aggregate all entries 
into a single entry whose value is the number of entries.  But I was 
wondering if there was a better way that possibly makes use of the 
CountingIterator class.