Michael Peacock - North East freelance web developer, author, entrepreneur

Making Pagination Easier

Pagination is one of those repetetive tasks which developers hate to do. Quite a while ago I made a nice function to handle most of my pagination tasks, and return an array of data I could do something with, to make things easier developing at work. More recently, I've improved this into a nice little object of its own, which I've modified slightly for release here.

My pagination object works by taking a limit of how many results should be displayed per page, and offset to determine which page we are on, and a query to paginate. A mysqli connection is passed to the constructor, so it can access the database (I do this differently for my own usage, but for the sake of re-use, I've tweaked it to work this way.

Usage

// establish a database connection in your code
$db = mysqli_connect( 'localhost', 'root', '', 'database');
// create the pagination object, and pass the database connection (assumes class is included)
$p = new Pagination( $db );
// set a limit
$p->setLimit(5);
// set an offset
$p->setOffset( isset( $_GET['page_number'] ) ? intval( $_GET['page_number'] ) : 0 );
// set the query
$p->setQuery( "SELECT * FROM table " );
// do the pagination
$p->generatePagination();
// what we do with these variables depends on the tempating system used: the pagination object could send them direct to the template system for us
// get an array of results
$results = $p->getResults();
// get the current page number
$current_page = $pagination->getCurrentPage();
// get the number of pages
$number_of_pages = $pagination->getNumPages()
if( $pagination->isFirst() )
{
	$first_page_link = "";
	$previous_page_link = "";		
}	
else
{
	$first_page_link = "<a href='?page_number=0'>First page</a>";
	$previous_page_link = "<a href='?page_number=".( $pagination->getCurrentPage() - 2 )."'>Previous page</a>";
}
if( $pagination->isLast() )
{
	$next_page_link = "";
	$last_page_link = "";		
}
else
{
	$next_page_link = "<a href='?page_number=" . $pagination->getCurrentPage() . "'>Next page</a>";
	$last_page_link = "<a href='?page_number=".( $pagination->getCurrentPage() - 1 )."'>Last page</a>";
}

Download

You can either download the class and supporting files as a zip, or view the code online.

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Posted by Michael on 14th Apr 2010 at 11:11