Strategy For Pagination?

Hi all,

   I have a situation where I have to display results in the form of page. To go about implementing I though of two things.

1) I keep the query as per the selection made by user in session and limit the result every time user asks for a different page.This means every time hitting the Db.

2)I get the complete result in a session variable eg: array of model instances and then use index of arrays to paginate the result.This will involve lot of memory usage.

I'll appreciate if someone guides me how to go about this.Displaying result in pages is not an issue but the the way to achieve it has put me on the back foot.

Regards Gaurav V Bagga

Gaurav,

I may be misunderstanding you, but here is my take on it.

In nearly all typical pagination scenarios, #1 will be the way to go.

Trying to manually do it in memory is probably going explode your application server as the volume of records grows along with the number of users.

determining a strategy for pagination.

If your user needs to page through a few hundred records, in batches of 10-50, then you should not have any issue using either the built in paginator, or better yet the most excellent paginator built by Bruce Williams (http://codefluency.com/projects).

From a useability standpoint, I still live by the words of a developer who shared the following advice - if you expect your users to page through thousands or tens of thousands of records, you don't know your users or use your own software.

You may want to consider other ways for users to locate what they are looking for. Tags, dates, categories, search capabilties all allow you to change the presentation of the data and allow users to find the desired data more quickly than paging through page after page of records.

Anyway, hope this helps.