Membership
Main Menu
Forum Boards
Stats
- 13 tutorials
- 68,437 members
- 630,820 forum posts
- 8 blog posts
Tutorials
PHP Basic Pagination
Views: 26773
Basic Pagination
As a web developer, you will often be tasked to display large amounts of data to the user in some kind of easy to read format. Let's say for instance you have a list of employees in your database, and you want to be able to list them on your web page. If you only have a dozen or so employees, it's no big deal to just make a simple loop and display them all on the same page, right? Well what happens when you have 50 employees? 100? 1,000? Suddenly listing all of them on the same page doesn't sound so hot.
Pulling out all that data at the same time can leave your user tapping his fingers on the desk wondering what the frak is taking so long, and when he finally does get his info, it's a whole frakking novel on one page! Can you imagine going down to the bookstore and picking up a book and instead of the story being divided up by pages, it's all on one really long page? I heard a rumor they used to do that back in the ancient days. I think they were called scrolls or something, I dunno.
Well anyways, it makes way more sense to break up your list into page-sized chunks, and only query your database one chunk at a time. This drastically reduces server processing time and page load time, as well as gives your user smaller pieces of info to digest, so he doesn't choke on whatever crap you're trying to feed him. The act of doing this is called pagination.
A basic pagination routine seems long and scary at first, but once you close your eyes, take a deep breath, and look at each piece of the script individually, you will find it's actually pretty easy stuff. In fact, in my experience over the years of helping out on the forums, peoples' hardest problem about pagination is figuring out what it's called in the first place! But since we've got that part sorted out, the rest should be a piece of cake, right? :)
