Consider the use cases and the needs of your API consumers when determining an optimal page size. For example, if the data is sorted by a timestamp or an identifier, the API consumer includes the last seen timestamp or identifier as a parameter to fetch the next set of records. This technique ensures efficient retrieval of subsequent pages without duplication or missing records. Page-based pagination involves using a “page” parameter to specify the desired page number. The API consumer requests a specific page of data, and the API responds with the corresponding page, typically along with metadata such as the total number of pages or total record count. This approach ensures stability when new data is added or existing data is modified.
The object ID is the default result, but results can be ordered in other ways as well. Pagination is quite commonly used within popular public web APIs that must deal with much data on the backend. It’s also adopted alongside filtering capabilities to help return more relevant information. After you make the first GET request, you’re going to search the results for the NEXT link and use that to return the next page of results. You can use many different approaches to create pagination in REST.
Example of Pagination in Practice: Spotify API
Depending on the size of the result set, this approach’s initial request will always take time equal to the time it takes to query for the entire set of data. But, subsequent page clicks will be fast, and depend on the client’s hardware. Note pagination in web application that if the result is large, it can take a while to download the first time around; in the worst case, it can hang the browser. This type of pagination algorithm is the most commonly used, more efficient, and produces less data redundancy.
Using ‘old’ pagination techniques is entirely unavoidable as the ‘old’ approaches are still important, especially when it comes to internal linking. Internal linking will make it easier for search engine bots to find paginated pages. When search engines crawl your site, the depth and number of pages they visit at a time will vary, depending on the search engine results pages, site’s trust, the content update rate, etc. Also, the limit will be spent on visiting pagination pages, and not on visiting really important pages of the site. To handle the mentioned drawbacks of the normal keyset pagination, you can add an offset to the timestamp and use a so-called “Continuation Token” or “Cursor”.
Database-Driven Pagination Algorithm
The offset is the position of the element relative to the first element with the same timestamp. It’s passed to the client in the response and can be submitted back to the server in order to retrieve the next page. Page-based navigation divides data into uniformly sized pages, simplifying data handling and enhancing the developer experience. More specifically, it allows you to specify the page number and the page size (limit). From there, the server can calculate the offset and return a page with items that match the page size. To make sure search engines understand the relationship between pages of paginated content, include links from each page to the following page using tags.
- I’m an experimentalist, researcher, recording every step of how to rank number 1.
- We do this by dividing the total number of items by the desired number of items per page.
- As APIs continue to get more involved and elaborate, API pagination is only going to become more essential.
- You then need to put the canonical tag on all the pages where the pagination landing page redirects to.
Provide informative error messages and proper HTTP status codes to guide API consumers in handling pagination-related issues. Here’s an example of breadcrumbs used on the specific paginated product page. It is important that search engine bots are able to understand the paginated pages that are related to particular keywords. If you split content types as a single article spread across multiple pages, you may end up with pages with little content.
How to Make the Best use of API Pagination with Node.js
Pagination works like a skilled librarian who’s efficiently organizing and presenting books (in this case, data) so that you can easily find what you are looking for. And similar to how there are different ways to catalog books, there are different ways to segment, or paginate, data. It’s a technique used in API design and development that allows you to take a REST API endpoint’s response and segment it into smaller, manageable units. The segmentation process that’s used can vary, as it depends on the type of API pagination you use. You can read on to learn more about REST API pagination, including different pagination patterns and best practices to optimize your API’s functionality. You can learn more about it by reading this in-depth article from Moesif or this one from Dzone.
It’s a pretty big step up in complexity but if you do make this step, you’ll end up with what you are really after, which is deterministic results for future requests. For my case I implicitly designate some API calls to allow getting the whole information (primarily reference table data). If an accurate live scrolling view is needed, REST APIs which are request/response in nature are not well suited for this purpose. For this you should consider WebSockets or HTML5 Server-Sent Events to let your front end know when dealing with changes. Our weekly newsletter provides the best practices you need to build high performing product integrations. To help simplify your efforts and provide all the B2B integrations your product needs, you can just build to Merge’s Unified API.
Middle-Tier-Driven Pagination Algorithm
To provide additional flexibility, consider implementing sorting and filtering capabilities within your paginated API. This allows clients to specify the sorting order of the data and apply filters to refine the result set. Sorting parameters could include sortField and sortOrder, while filtering parameters may involve fields like filterBy and filterValue.
The cursor can be based on various criteria, such as a timestamp, a primary key, or an encoded representation of the record. Items on your paginated pages need to be ordered based on priority. Paginated pages containing the most relevant content are only a few links from the landing page. Google search bots garner content from different pages and then choose which one is canonical. You therefore, need to ensure that your paginated pages have unique content and that it is relevant for your users. In this episode, I want to show you the differences between the offset-based and cursor-based approach to pagination and a possible implementation in Node.js.
However, poorly designed pagination can disrupt the user experience. If page numbers are too close together or if there’s no clear way to move to the next chunk of content, users can become frustrated. Now if there’s a need to get a snapshot of the data, I would just provide an API call that provides all the data in one request with no pagination. Mind you, you would need something that would do streaming of the output without temporarily loading it in memory if you have a large data set. As APIs continue to get more involved and elaborate, API pagination is only going to become more essential.
The Spotify API documentation is a model example of how pagination is often adopted within web APIs. By modeling this and other popular public APIs, you can build pagination best practices into your services that enable users to seamlessly interact with complex databases. The limit parameter can also be used with offset to retrieve further results. For example, this would respond with the next ten following albums. To make sure we’re on the same page, let’s start by looking at what pagination is. Then we’ll delve deeper into API pagination with example code implementations.
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Sites like e-commerce and news sites have no option but to keep using pagination. The Index Coverage Status report will come in handy here to show you which of your paginated pages are being indexed. If too much information is published on one page, the user may get overwhelmed. Pagination allows webmasters to present a lot of information in small and manageable chunks.
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