Pagination

Pagination

The default will use sort and where to automatically browse to the next page. If you're sorting by name+asc, the response contains the first 100 results and the last item is the name Frank, the next page will be a filter where=name>Frank.

The Pagination category will be configurable. We'd want to support:

• The default where and sort technique.
• A classic page=2 parameter. Maybe with size=100 parameter.
• Another classic limit and offset parameters. Or skip and take.

Link header

The Endpoints library will use the page info to return a Link header that can be followed to get the next page.

Link: <https://api.yourapplication.com/people?sort=name+asc&where=name%3EFrank>; rel="next"

Wrapped response

This will most likely need to tie into the ResponseGenerator to get page info in the response body. Something like:

GET /people?sort=name

{
    items: [
         { id: 1, name: "Aaron" },
        ...
         { id: 1234, name: "Frank" },
    ],
    page: {
        next: "/people?sort=name&where=name>Frank"
    }
}

Prev problem

Automatically finding a query to get the page before could prove to be difficult.

One option is to use a new querystring param to specify that the results are paged to the end of the sort. For example, on the >Frank page:

GET /people?sort=name&where=name>Frank

{
    items: [
         { id: 1235, name: "Fred" },
        ...
         { id: 2345, name: "Jo" },
    ],
    page: {
        prev: "/people?where=name<Frank&sort=name+asc&page=end",
        next: "/people?where=name>Jo&sort=name+asc"
    }
}

Another option is to include it as a third sort modifier. Thought of like "sort descending, then limit results, then sort ascending". This also forces a sort order to be specified this way, which resolves the problem where with SQL servers that don't use LIMIT and OFFSET.

        prev: "/people?where=name<Frank&sort=name+asc+end"

Or perhaps to add further control, a parameter to specify sort instructions after the limiting:

        prev: "/people?where=name<Frank&sort=name+desc&postsort=name+asc"