Pagination

Django provides high-level and low-level ways to help you manage paginated data – that is, data that’s split across several pages, with “Previous/Next” links.

The Paginator class

Under the hood, all methods of pagination use the Paginator class. It does all the heavy lifting of actually splitting a QuerySet into parts and handing them over to other components.

Example

Give Paginator a list of objects, plus the number of items you’d like to have on each page, and it gives you methods for accessing the items for each page:

>>> from django.core.paginator import Paginator
>>> objects = ['john', 'paul', 'george', 'ringo']
>>> p = Paginator(objects, 2)

>>> p.count
4
>>> p.num_pages
2
>>> type(p.page_range)
<class 'range_iterator'>
>>> p.page_range
range(1, 3)

>>> page1 = p.page(1)
>>> page1
<Page 1 of 2>
>>> page1.object_list
['john', 'paul']

>>> page2 = p.page(2)
>>> page2.object_list
['george', 'ringo']
>>> page2.has_next()
False
>>> page2.has_previous()
True
>>> page2.has_other_pages()
True
>>> page2.next_page_number()
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
EmptyPage: That page contains no results
>>> page2.previous_page_number()
1
>>> page2.start_index() # The 1-based index of the first item on this page
3
>>> page2.end_index() # The 1-based index of the last item on this page
4

>>> p.page(0)
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
EmptyPage: That page number is less than 1
>>> p.page(3)
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
EmptyPage: That page contains no results

Note

Note that you can give Paginator a list/tuple, a Django QuerySet, or any other object with a count() or __len__() method. When determining the number of objects contained in the passed object, Paginator will first try calling count(), then fallback to using len() if the passed object has no count() method. This allows objects such as Django’s QuerySet to use a more efficient count() method when available.

Paginating a ListView

django.views.generic.list.ListView provides a builtin way to paginate the displayed list. You can do this by adding paginate_by attribute to your view class, for example:

from django.views.generic import ListView

from myapp.models import Contacts

class ContactsList(ListView):
    paginate_by = 2
    model = Contacts

The only thing your users will be missing is a way to navigate to the next or previous page. To achieve this, add links to the next and previous page, like shown in the below example list.html.

Using Paginator in a view

Here’s a slightly more complex example using Paginator in a view to paginate a queryset. We give both the view and the accompanying template to show how you can display the results. This example assumes you have a Contacts model that has already been imported.

The view function looks like this:

from django.core.paginator import Paginator
from django.shortcuts import render

def listing(request):
    contact_list = Contacts.objects.all()
    paginator = Paginator(contact_list, 25) # Show 25 contacts per page

    page = request.GET.get('page')
    contacts = paginator.get_page(page)
    return render(request, 'list.html', {'contacts': contacts})

In the template list.html, you’ll want to include navigation between pages along with any interesting information from the objects themselves:

{% for contact in contacts %}
    {# Each "contact" is a Contact model object. #}
    {{ contact.full_name|upper }}<br>
    ...
{% endfor %}

<div class="pagination">
    <span class="step-links">
        {% if contacts.has_previous %}
            <a href="?page=1">&laquo; first</a>
            <a href="?page={{ contacts.previous_page_number }}">previous</a>
        {% endif %}

        <span class="current">
            Page {{ contacts.number }} of {{ contacts.paginator.num_pages }}.
        </span>

        {% if contacts.has_next %}
            <a href="?page={{ contacts.next_page_number }}">next</a>
            <a href="?page={{ contacts.paginator.num_pages }}">last &raquo;</a>
        {% endif %}
    </span>
</div>
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