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Pagination in Javascript and React, with a custom usePagination() hook

damilola jerugba on October 09, 2021

This guide is to help you understand the concept of pagination and how to implement it in react, the concepts in this tutorial can be applied to an...

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damilola jerugba • Oct 11 '21 • Edited

Hi Everyone, I've noticed most of you guys are requesting for features like the ability for the repo to handle more than 1000 pages, the usePagination() hook can handle ∞ number of pages. But you guys are should understand that this blog post is simply to show the usePagination() hook and has nothing to do with the pagination buttons or styling. Some of you are requesting that I should add the UI functionality of ... in the middle of the pagination buttons for pages that are as large as a 100 pages. This require for the usePagination() hook to also return a component that contains the pagination buttons.

If you'd like me to implement this, please get the github repo to 50 stars and i'll convert this into a full library that tackles these issues and more.

You are also free to collaborate on this repo so we can build it as a library together 💙

Thank you 💙💙💙💙

Matt • Oct 14 '21

Here's a fully functional usePagination hook, with a demo of rendering buttons and an ellipsis: mui.com/components/pagination/#use...

damilola jerugba • Oct 15 '21

That’s great, but you’ll need install the ‘@mui’ library to use it

Matt • Oct 16 '21

Well, sure, but that's a single command (yarn add or npm install). And since all you import is the hook, that's all that will be included in your bundle.

damilola jerugba • Oct 16 '21

I'll try that, but I'll still challenge myself and create a npm package, it will be my first open source project

Matt • Oct 16 '21

Of course! And perhaps you’ll find a more elegant implementation. It’s a tricky problem to solve! Good luck! 👍

Jakub T. Jankiewicz • Oct 10 '21

Do you have a working demo? Does't it work with 1000 pages?

damilola jerugba • Oct 10 '21

The number of pages fully depend on the contentPerPage, the API route I used in the code only returns an array of 20 items so the maximum possible number of pages is either 1 or 20, with 3 contentPerPage it generated 7 pages

Here is a working demo => use-pagination.vercel.app/

Jakub T. Jankiewicz • Oct 10 '21 • Edited

So it's not fully functional pagination. Just a simple demo.
Here is example how pagination should work (the code is in PHP but it's algorithm that can be rewritten in any language).
gist.github.com/bramus/5d8f2e0269e...

Also note that prev should be disabled when on first page.

damilola jerugba • Oct 10 '21

It's functional, I was referring to Typescript you were talking about types. There are many ways to implement pagination, this is just my way, and this will work for any language

Jakub T. Jankiewicz • Oct 10 '21 • Edited

It's functional, I was referring to Typescript you were talking about types.

I don't quite understand what you write this above comment. I just mean that this is not fully implemented pagination, because it's missing fundamental features. So it can't be used in any real projects. You need to implement the thing yourself if you want to have something that is a full pagination. Also this will not work with any language because it's like half of the implementation.

damilola jerugba • Oct 10 '21 • Edited

Sorry I thought I replied to another comment, could you list out these features, so I improve this React hook

damilola jerugba • Oct 10 '21

You are also free to make contributions to the repo

Jakub T. Jankiewicz • Oct 11 '21

Added two issues. I may contribute if the issue is not fixed when I will need pagination since I will need something like this in the near future for my application.

damilola jerugba • Oct 11 '21

👍🏽

Rob Levin • Dec 27 '21

Thanks for this article @damiisdandy — the illustrations are very helpful and I appreciate the time you spent to share this with the community! Very happy you used buttons too :)

I coded this up for my AgnosticUI library and found my SRP cohesion was best when I made my usePagination.ts hook only concerned with generating the paging links. Then my Pagination.tsx provided the React view and the consumer could simply DI inject the generated pages into the component. The consumer actually keeps track of const [currentPage, setCurrentPage] = useState(1) and listens for a onPageChanged callback resulting in updating the current page. That in turn triggers the useEffect that just asks for the pages to be regenerated with the new current page. It all seems to work quite nicely!

Also, I looked at many many examples on the web and found one somewhere that utilizes currying and utilized that approach as it's extremely efficient and readable:

  const generatePagingPaddedByOne = (current: number, totalPageCount: number) => {
    const center = [current - 1, current, current + 1];
    const filteredCenter: PageArrayItem[] = center.filter((p) => p > 1 && p < totalPageCount);
    const includeLeftDots = current > 3;
    const includeRightDots = current < totalPageCount - 2;
    return getPaddedArray(filteredCenter, includeLeftDots, includeRightDots, totalPageCount);
  };

My API allows you to use 1 or 2 for padding (I've also seen this called one of: "gap" or "offset" or "siblingCount"). Looking at Ant Design and Zen Garden, they both used padding of 1 on both sides but I think 2 is nice to have as an option. The curry approach above is so crystal clear it almost feels like cheating, but, it's also very efficient for large data sets. Thoughts?

I'm actually work-in-progress on this so I don't have a link with live example but I've completed (I think) my React implementation here: pagination component and pagination hook. It gives tabbing for free since it uses buttons (quite similar to how you've done I think; yay for using semantic elements!)

I wonder if this might be an interesting alternative approach for these folks asking about > 1k pages as the curry approach isn't affected by size nor does it require a massive loop. Wish I could take credit but I saw it in a gist "somewhere" and adapted it to my needs. What a challenging programming task to write a good pagination! I'd fail this in a timed interview for sure lol

damilola jerugba • Dec 27 '21

Thanks so much, and your idea is solid!

Prawin G • Oct 10 '21

Hi @damiisdandy just a small doubt,
In changePage function how does state variable work ?
And what's the difference between props data type with and without it ?
say (x : number) || (x)

Btw great code

damilola jerugba • Oct 10 '21

the changePage function simply takes in a boolean of either true or false, if true the page state is incremented, and if false the page state is decremented.

there is no functional difference between adding a data type, this is just used so you can't predict the type of value used in the function later and to aid IntelliSense in your IDE. if a data type is not provided typescript will read it as a type of any which is okay.

Also with the useState() hook setPage() can either take in a number or a function that returns a number, which is what I used.

Igor Agapov • Oct 11 '21

setPage: (n: number) => void

const usePagination = ({
  contentPerPage,
  count
}: UsePaginationProps): UsePaginationReturn => { /* ... */ }

damilola jerugba • Oct 11 '21

usePaginationReturn is an interface for an object not a function.


type UsePagination = (UsePaginationProps) => (UsePaginationReturn);
const usePagination: UsePagination = ({ contentPerPage, count }) => {  /*...*/ }

The above type is the correct implementation.

Igor Agapov • Oct 12 '21

usePaginationReturn is an interface for an object, returning from a function, so this

type UsePagination = (UsePaginationProps) => (UsePaginationReturn);
const usePagination: UsePagination = ({ contentPerPage, count }) => {  /*...*/ }

is equivalent to this

const usePagination = ({ contentPerPage, count }: UsePaginationProps): UsePaginationReturn => { /* ... */ }

Just -1 type

Harsh Rastogi • Oct 10 '21

Nice

damilola jerugba • Oct 10 '21

Thanks, glad you liked it

Raghav Gupta • Oct 10 '21

Awesome

damilola jerugba • Oct 10 '21

Thanks 👍🏽

damilola jerugba • Oct 11 '21

Follow me on github and twitter

damilola jerugba • Oct 12 '21

Thank you ⚡

Vu • Oct 10 '21

it doesn't work when you have many pages like more than 100

damilola jerugba • Oct 10 '21

Can you share a piece of the code you wrote, 100 pages depends on the content per page. It should work for any number.

Shaalan Marwan • Oct 10 '21

Very clear , thanks

damilola jerugba • Oct 10 '21

You are welcome ❤️