I have an ArrayList of Books pulled from different Merchants and sorted in Java, depending on user preferences, according to price or customer reviews:
List<Book> books = new ArrayList<Book>();
This requires me to keep a large chunk of data in memory stored as Java objects at all times. Now that I need to paginate this data into listings that span multiple web pages and allow a user to click on a numbered page link to hop to that segment of the data, what’s the best way to do this?
My idea was to have maybe 25 book listings per page and rather than use hyperlinks that submit the form data as a GET request of URL parameters, the page number hyperlinks would simply resubmit the form, passing the requested page number as an additional form POST parameter.
<input type="hidden" id="pageNumber" value="0">
<a href="#" onClick="pageNumber=5; this.form.submit()">Page 5</a>
In that case page 5 would simply be a set of 25 records starting at the 125th (5 * 25) record in the ArrayList and ending at the 149th record in the ArrayList.
Is there a better way to do this?
Refactor your application to let e.g. Hibernate pull out data from the underlying database.
Hibernate can do all the sorting and pagination without you having to keep it all in memory at all times.