RESTful Pagination Using the Paginate Decorator

Table of Contents

• RESTful Pagination Using the Paginate Decorator
  • The Problem
  • The Solution

This is just a little hint how to get around those ugly URL query parameters that the @paginate decorator generates.

The Problem

Say have this simple controller:

class Users(Controller):
    @expose(...)
    @paginate('users')
    def index(self):
        return dict(users=User.query())

${tg.paginate.get_href(page)} would generate an URL like this:

/users?users_tgp_no=2&users_tgp_limit=5

That’s not beautiful.

The Solution

But it’s quite simple to achieve pagination with URLs like these:

/paginate1/page/2

You just have to create an additional exposed method page that will “translate” the requested page into the desired kwarg and call the original method:

@expose()
def page(self, page):
    return self.index(users_tgp_page=page)

Basically that’s it. But you cannot use paginate.get_href anymore. I generated the URLs manually in my (Genshi) template:

# Generate RESTful pagination URLs: /foo/bar/page/42
import cherrypy

base = cherrypy.request.path
if not base.endswith('/'):
    base += '/'

current_page_path = '/page/' + str(tg.paginate.current_page) + '/'
if base.endswith(current_page_path):
    base = base[:-len(current_page_path) + 1]

You then just create links like this:

<a href="${base}page/$page" py:if="page != tg.paginate.current_page">$page</a>

Maybe anyone can make use of this :)

Note

If you want a RESTful pagination for any other method than index, you have to create an additional controller with an index and page method and attach this controller to the parent.