A little over six years ago I wrote a little blog post on how to do simple pagination in ColdFusion: ColdFusion and Pagination The post walked you through the simple step of iterating over a 'page' (or limited set) of data and providing links to navigate the data. For whatever reason, the post has gotten a few comments lately so I thought I'd post a quick update.

First off - Scott correctly pointed out that you should try your best to paginate in the database itself. I agreed - but to be fair - this example was meant for short sets of data that a user would actually peruse. I don't expect users to click "Next Page" over a few million records. That being said - you should try to offload as much as possible to the database and reduce the work your application server has to do.

Secondly - another reader, Ulises, asked if I could update my code to show the current page and the total number of pages. Both were rather easy. Let's look at the complete template and I'll explain how I added these features.

For the most part - this template is based on the code from the previous entry so I will not be covering every line. I did simplify the query a bit and used ColdFusion 10's simpler queryAddRow support.

The critical changes are these lines:

By using a simple bit of math, I can determine both what the total number of pages are as well as the current page. If I decide to change the size of a page later on the math will continue to work. And that's it. Not exactly rocket science, but the basic concept of paging over a set of data is still something folks like to see examples of, so I hope this is helpful! If you fancy seeing a demo, click the big obvious Demo button below...