Does Rails have a built-in pagination solution?

Question

I've noticed that pagination gems like mislav-will_paginate are quite popular. Is this because Rails does not have a built-in pagination solution or because the built-in solution is not very good?

Answer 1

In Rails 2.0 the pagination ability of ActionController was removed and turned into a plugin for backwards compatibility called 'classic_pagination'. However, from my searches for a pagination solution for myself the consensus seems to be that using 'classic_pagination' is not optimal.

After watching a couple of podcasts and after several recommendations I opted to try the will_paginate plugin and haven't looked back. It's fast, easy to use and well-maintained.

I believe that even V2 of Searchlogic recommends its use.

Answer 2

If you are using Rails 3 Kaminari plugin will be very handy for pagination. Github Railscasts

Answer 3

Rails has built-in pagination, but it's a simple module and not suitable for all needs. Unless you have specific pagination needs in mind though, it should suit most purposes.

Here's a good article on how to use Rails pagination

Answer 4

I'd recommend searchlogic. It has pagination built in and many other nices things.

• Easy filtering
• Pagination
• Sorting

And.. for all of that nice helpers.

Code says more than thousand words (dont get confused by the HAML example, you can use normal erb templates if you prefer them, the code/structure is the same):

Controller:

  def index
    @search = User.new_search(params[:search])
    @users, @users_count = @search.all, @search.count
  end

Pagination stuff in the view:

== Per page: #{per_page_select}
== Page: #{page_select}

Sort as/by in view:

  - unless @users_count.zero?
    %table
      %tr
        %th= order_by_link :account => :name
        %th= order_by_link :first_name
        %th= order_by_link :last_name
        %th= order_by_link :email
      - @users.each do |user|
        %tr
          %td= user.account? ? user.account.name : "-"
          %td= user.first_name
          %td= user.last_name
          %td= user.email

Easy, simple and quick filters:

  - form_for @search do |f|
    - f.fields_for @search.conditions do |users|
      = users.text_field :first_name_contains
      = users.date_select :created_after
      - users.fields_for users.object.orders do |orders|
        = orders.select :total_gt, (1..100)
    = f.submit "Search"

And everything works together, so changing a page and then the sorting, and adding a filter works without losing any of the other settings :).

All you need is in your environment.rb:

config.gem "searchlogic"

and install it with: rake gems:install

Also checkout the online example