Pagination Solution

Anon

I have scoured the Internet (notice how is shines!) and cannot find the solution I need. I am only a seudo-developer so bear with me. I have an existing site that for the most part uses flat include pages. On several of these pages though I want to have the ability to paginate the content so that it doesn't scroll into the nether regions. The site is dynamic and I am already using a Mod-rewrite rule to simplfy URL etc. Not sure what effect this will have if the solution for the pagination involves more variables (which I am sure most would). I am really surprised that there are not more articles written on this.

I have created (2) tables via MySQL for storing the article and page data. Can anybody give me some pointers on a simple solution? I am only dealing with about 5-6 of these sections that need multiple pages. So with only 6 article_id's I was thinking I could just pass that info on the include page to the function (which would be a seperate include). That way it will know which article to select data from without having to use GET_VARS, etc.

[deleted]

First of all, as you are 'complaining' about messy URL's, look at the PHP manual, read about sessions. they let you store PHP variables on the serverside and link them to a specific website visitor. very usefull.

Second, there is an article about pagination here:
http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/rod20000221.php3

the main thing is that Most databases, like MySQL and PostgreSQL let you LIMIT the amount of records returned, based on an offset and a length.

For example:
SELECT * FROM table LIMIT 24,10
will fetch 10 results starting from the 24th result.

This way you can run the same query over and over, and use the offset ad length to get different 'pages' of results.

if you have 20 results per page, and you want to get the 6th page:

SELECT FROM table LIMIT (6-1)20,20

(6-1 because the first page starts at zero, not at 20)

Anon

Thanks for the input. I had looked at the article you listed, however like most next/previous tutorials out there it's coming at it more from a "query results" situation, like a search engine. What I need is a script that is only pulling one result... and the right one for the section and page you are on.

For example the article system that this site uses for most articles that have more than one page.

And I wasn't "complaining" about messy URLs. I used mod-rewrite to simplify some of the links, etc. I don't mind a string variable here and there.

[deleted]

I see. so you are just looking for a script that will do a query and print the data from that query. so what's the problem.

Anon

Hey Jim,

Those multiple pages that you are dealing with, how are they stored now? Is the story stored as a whole and you need to go back and parse the individual sections, or is it stored in 5 or 6 individual sections?

Why not have a table titled article_sections. Each article section or fragment could have it's own id AND an id that points to another table containing information about the article. How many pages, title, topic, and so on.

Now I'm going to assume that you're with me so far and let you figure out the rest. Otherwise, if you are still having problems, drop me a note as this is something I've been curious about doing myself for some time.

Or just let me know how it works out.

Later on,
morpheus()

Anon

Morpheus,
Thanks for the suggestion. I think I have a basic idea of how to do it but as I am more of a Web designer and not a developer I am rather clueless when it comes to writing code from sratch. That's why I was looking for a script that someone may have already dealt with this kind of thing.

I have been working with PHPNuke and PostNuke a lot lately and I think there might be something I can use in the sections module. There is a function to break up a contiguous block of text into seperate pages. That might work for me. I will let you know what I come up with.

Thanks again.