Paginate in your headers, not in your response body. This follows the proposed RFC-8288 standard for Web linking.
In your Gemfile
:
# Requires Rails (Rails-API is also supported), or Grape
# v0.10.0 or later. If you're on an earlier version of
# Grape, use api-pagination v3.0.2.
gem 'rails', '>= 3.0.0'
gem 'rails-api'
gem 'grape', '>= 0.10.0'
# Then choose your preferred paginator from the following:
gem 'pagy'
gem 'kaminari'
gem 'will_paginate'
# Finally...
gem 'api-pagination'
By default, api-pagination will detect whether you're using Pagy, Kaminari, or WillPaginate, and it will name headers appropriately. If you want to change any of the configurable settings, you may do so:
ApiPagination.configure do |config|
# If you have more than one gem included, you can choose a paginator.
config.paginator = :kaminari # or :will_paginate
# By default, this is set to 'Total'
config.total_header = 'X-Total'
# By default, this is set to 'Per-Page'
config.per_page_header = 'X-Per-Page'
# Optional: set this to add a header with the current page number.
config.page_header = 'X-Page'
# Optional: set this to add other response format. Useful with tools that define :jsonapi format
config.response_formats = [:json, :xml, :jsonapi]
# Optional: what parameter should be used to set the page option
config.page_param = :page
# or
config.page_param do |params|
params[:page][:number] if params[:page].is_a?(ActionController::Parameters)
end
# Optional: what parameter should be used to set the per page option
config.per_page_param = :per_page
# or
config.per_page_param do |params|
params[:page][:size] if params[:page].is_a?(ActionController::Parameters)
end
# Optional: Include the total and last_page link header
# By default, this is set to true
# Note: When using kaminari, this prevents the count call to the database
config.include_total = false
end
Pagy does not have a built-in way to specify a maximum number of items per page, but api-pagination
will check if you've set a :max_per_page
variable. To configure this, you can use the following code somewhere in an initializer:
Pagy::VARS[:max_per_page] = 100
If left unconfigured, clients can request as many items per page as they wish, so it's highly recommended that you configure this.
In your controller, provide a pageable collection to the paginate
method. In its most convenient form, paginate
simply mimics render
:
class MoviesController < ApplicationController
# GET /movies
def index
movies = Movie.all # Movie.scoped if using ActiveRecord 3.x
paginate json: movies
end
# GET /movies/:id/cast
def cast
actors = Movie.find(params[:id]).actors
# Override how many Actors get returned. If unspecified,
# params[:per_page] (which defaults to 25) will be used.
paginate json: actors, per_page: 10
end
end
This will pull your collection from the json
or xml
option, paginate it for you using params[:page]
and params[:per_page]
, render Link headers, and call ActionController::Base#render
with whatever you passed to paginate
. This should work well with ActiveModel::Serializers. However, if you need more control over what is done with your paginated collection, you can pass the collection directly to paginate
to receive a paginated collection and have your headers set. Then, you can pass that paginated collection to a serializer or do whatever you want with it:
class MoviesController < ApplicationController
# GET /movies
def index
movies = paginate Movie.all
render json: MoviesSerializer.new(movies)
end
# GET /movies/:id/cast
def cast
actors = paginate Movie.find(params[:id]).actors, per_page: 10
render json: ActorsSerializer.new(actors)
end
end
Note that the collection sent to paginate
must respond to your paginator's methods. This is typically fine unless you're dealing with a stock Array. For Kaminari, Kaminari.paginate_array
will be called for you behind-the-scenes. For WillPaginate, you're out of luck unless you call require 'will_paginate/array'
somewhere. Because this pollutes Array
, it won't be done for you automatically. If you use Pagy, it doesn't matter, because Pagy doesn't care what you're paginating. It will just work, as long as the collection responds to count
.
NOTE: In versions 4.4.0 and below, the Rails::Pagination
module would end up included in ActionController::Base
even if ActionController::API
was defined. As of version 4.5.0, this is no longer the case. If for any reason your API controllers cannot easily changed be changed to inherit from ActionController::API
instead, you can manually include the module:
class API::ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
include Rails::Pagination
end
With Grape, paginate
is used to declare that your endpoint takes a :page
and :per_page
param. You can also directly specify a :max_per_page
that users aren't allowed to go over. Then, inside your API endpoint, it simply takes your collection:
class MoviesAPI < Grape::API
format :json
desc 'Return a paginated set of movies'
paginate
get do
# This method must take an ActiveRecord::Relation
# or some equivalent pageable set.
paginate Movie.all
end
route_param :id do
desc "Return one movie's cast, paginated"
# Override how many Actors get returned. If unspecified,
# params[:per_page] (which defaults to 25) will be used.
# There is no default for `max_per_page`.
paginate per_page: 10, max_per_page: 200
get :cast do
paginate Movie.find(params[:id]).actors
end
desc "Return one movie's awards, paginated"
# Enforce max_per_page value will add the alowed values
# to the swagger docs, and cause grape to return an error
# if outside that range
paginate per_page: 10, max_per_page: 200, enforce_max_per_page: true
get :awards do
paginate Movie.find(params[:id]).awards
end
end
end
Then curl --include
to see your header-based pagination in action:
$ curl --include 'https://localhost:3000/movies?page=5'
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Link: <http://localhost:3000/movies?page=1>; rel="first",
<http://localhost:3000/movies?page=173>; rel="last",
<http://localhost:3000/movies?page=6>; rel="next",
<http://localhost:3000/movies?page=4>; rel="prev"
Total: 4321
Per-Page: 10
# ...
api-pagination requires either Kaminari or WillPaginate in order to function, but some users may find themselves in situations where their application includes both. For example, you may have included ActiveAdmin (which uses Kaminari for pagination) and WillPaginate to do your own pagination. While it's suggested that you remove one paginator gem or the other, if you're unable to do so, you must configure api-pagination explicitly:
ApiPagination.configure do |config|
config.paginator = :will_paginate
end
If you don't do this, an annoying warning will print once your app starts seeing traffic. You should also configure Kaminari to use a different name for its per_page
method (see https://github.com/activeadmin/activeadmin/wiki/How-to-work-with-will_paginate):
Kaminari.configure do |config|
config.page_method_name = :per_page_kaminari
end