How to make clean pagination with no additional dependencies. Basically for Node.js but can be used in any other languages and platforms.
Onсe upon a time, we had a complex project enough (ride-sharing and taxi application) with stack Node.js and MongoDB. We have chosen this stack because it was preferable by the customer, good known by our team, and at the same time looks like good a suite for project tasks.
Everything was great, the number of users became more than twelve thousand, the number of active drivers was close to three hundred drivers. In one year, the number of rides becomes more than two million.
But once we need to create an admin panel to control and monitor all processes (from the business point of view) in the main application. The huge percent of requirements was to have advanced lists of a variety of entities, with bind statistics over them.
Another requirement was to have a possibility to choose a specific page on-demand, so the approach to use “previous-next”-like pagination, that based on cursors was prohibited immediately — its mongoose-paginate-v2 and _mongoose-aggregate-paginate-v2 _libraries.
The oldest, and probably the simplest in usage is mongoose-paginate — it uses simple search queries, limit, sort, and the skip operations. I guess it’s a good variant for simple pagination — just install a plugin, add few lines of code to your endpoint, and that’s all — work is done. It even can use “populate” of mongoose, — something that emulates joins from SQL world. Technically it just makes additional queries to the database, that probably not the way you want. Even more, when you just have a little bit more complicated query, with any data transformation, it will be totally unusable. I know just one way to normally use it in such cases — first create MongoDB View — technically its pre-saved queries, that MongoDB represents as read-only collections. And just then run pagination using mongoose-paginate over this view. Not bad — you will hide complicated queries under view, but we have a better idea of how to solve this problem.
#mongodb #nodejs #javascript #mongoose
