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The Potential Pitfalls of Pagination

jade.ellis.link The Potential Pitfalls of Pagination

Pagination is a core part of many APIs, but many methods have hidden pitfalls. This post explores these common issues.

The Potential Pitfalls of Pagination
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  • In time-based pagination, the suggested fix to lots of data in a selected timespan is:

    simply adding a limit to the amount of records returned (potentially via a query parameter) transparently solves it.

    This means clients can't see all the results, unless you add a way to view other pages of data, which is just pagination again. Or is the intended design that clients view either the first x results (the default) or view all results?

    The problem with articles like OPs and others is that they don't allow custom sorting, which is often a requirement, e.g. interfaces that present the data in a table, where column headers can be clicked to sort.

    • Regarding your first paragraph, this results limit is per page. To get the next page, you take your timestamp of the last item and use it in from_time, or whatever you've called it. It's still a pagination technique.

      Regarding custom sorting, some of the techniques in the article can do this, some of them can't. Obviously timestamp based pagination can't, however the ID-based pagination that I mentioned can.

18 comments