PHP Pagination using generated objects

PHP pagination is often required when you need to create reporting views of your database tables. For example, let’s say you need to create a list of all guests attending a particular event. If you have a ‘Guest’ object, calling

$guest = new Guest();
$guestList = $guest -> GetList(array(array(“guestId”, “>”, 0)));

will return the complete guest list.

However, quite often, the number of results that match the conditions passed to GetList() is quite large, and you need to split your result set across many html pages. This is usually referred to as PHP paging or pagination.

If you were writing your own SQL queries to access your database, and wanted to limit your query result to 50, the query would look something like this:

select * from table guest where guestid > 0 Limit 0, 50.

where 0 is the offset and 50 is the limit. In the query above, mysql would return row 0 to 50 of the result set.

You can use the same concept and syntax with objects generated by POG. To get the first 50 guests from your guest list using the guest object, all you need to do is call

$guest = new Guest();
$guestList = $guest -> GetList(array(array(“guestId”, “>”, 0)), ‘’, true, “0, 50”);

In the above code, instead of passing a simple value to the $limit variable, we passed “0, 50” which allows us to specify the limit and offset of the objects we want. Note that passing “0,50” is equivalent to passing “50”.

So, if we were building a report with 50 guests per html page, the above query would give us the values for the first page. What about the second page? To obtain result set 50-100, we simply call

$guest = new Guest();
$guestList = $guest -> GetList(array(array(“guestId”, “>”, 0)), ‘’, true, “50, 50”);

This tells POG to return 50 results starting from row 50.

Therefore, the pattern can be summarized as follows:

Page 1 – $limit = “0, 50”
Page 2 – $limit = “50, 50”
Page 3 – $limit = “100, 50”
And so on.

As you can see, POG CRUD methods are simple, yet powerful enough to handle PHP pagination.

For a detailed documentation of the GetList CRUD method, please refer to the POG tutorials