Django pagination and “current page”

Question

I\'m currently developing a Django application which will make use of the infamous \"pagination\" technique. I\'m trying to figure out how the django.core.paginator module work

Answer 1

Hmm... I see from your comment that you don't want to do the ol' GET parameter, which is what django.core.paginator was written for using. To do what you want, I can think of no better way than to precompute the page that each question is on. As an example, your view will end up being something like:

ITEMS_PER_PAGE = 20
def show_question(question_pk):
    questions = Question.objects.all()
    for index, question in enumerate(questions):
        question.page = ((index - 1) / ITEMS_PER_PAGE) + 1
    paginator = Paginator(questions, ITEMS_PER_PAGE)
    page = paginator.page(questions.get(pk=question_pk).page)
    return render_to_response('show_question.html', { 'page' : page })

To highlight the current page in the template, you'd do something like

{% for i in page.paginator.page_range %}
    {% ifequal i page.number %}
        
    {% else %}
        
    {% endifequal %}
{% endfor %}

As for the items, you'll have two different object_lists to work with...

page.object_list

will be the objects in the current page and

page.paginator.object_list

will be all objects, regardless of page. Each of those items will have a "page" variable that will tell you which page they're on.

That all said, what you're doing sounds unconventional. You may want to rethink, but either way, good luck.