Pagination

Seek Index or Key

The seek index or key must be totally-ordered and strictly monotonic. If the seek index or key is not strictly monotonic, it's possible to skip items when doing the pagination because the seek in cursor pagination is assumed to be exclusive. If it is not totally ordered, then pagination may not be consistent as certain items may move ahead or behind on depending on non-deterministic factors.

If you are using date or timestamps as the as the seek, you must realise that JavaScript Date object only has up to millisecond precision. If you are storing more precise timestamps, during the comparison operation for pagination, you must do the comparison at millisecond precision because when JavaScript is sending timestamps to the server, it would only produce millisecond precise timestamps. Alternatively you can ensure that your backend is only storing only millisecond precise timestamps.

Offset

Offset pagination relies on a seek and limit number.

Consider the resource we are paginating is:

['A', 'B', 'C', 'D']

The seek index starts at 0 and it is inclusive.

The limit is the desired length of the returned pagination view.

A seek and limit of [0, 2] would return ['A', 'B'].

Page numbers start from 1. However we refer to them with a page index that starts at 0.

The total represents the total number of items when the pagination was fetched. The true total of items may have changed on the server side since fetching a pagination.

Cursor

Cursor pagination relies on unique orderable seek key.

Consider the resource we are paginating is:

['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E']

Assume that the seek key is [0, 1, 2, 3, 4]:

• Using direction = true, seek = 0 and limit = 2, you would get ['B', 'C'].
• Using direction = false, seek = 3 and limit = 2, you would get ['B', 'C'].
• Using direction = null, seekAfter = 1, seekBefore = 3, you would get ['C'].

Notice that the seek, seekStart and seekEnd are all exclusive. This is required so that paging doesn't show results that overlap with existing results. This is because the next or previous page is fetched by using the seek key of the first or last item.

Therefore to get the ['A'], you would need to seek with 0 - 1. Or at least some way of subtracting the seek key.

Valid seek keys include integers and dates.

There can be an extra parameter called sort that would sort the results according the seek key in descending or ascending manner. Here we assume ascending sort. This is however not a concern of pagination, but a concern of how results should be displayed. Therefore the direction parameter controls the direction of the seek, but not the order of the results.

Cursor pagination does not allow random access of the pages. You can however randomly access if you know the seek key you want.

Publishing

# npm login
npm version patch # major/minor/patch
npm run build
npm publish --access public
git push
git push --tags