Question

I’d like to be able to display all records without the actual need of pagination but still want to keep the functionality of having sortable column headers by using something like $this->Paginator->sort().

Currently I’m setting 'limit' => 100 because I know I won’t ever have about more than about 50 records at a time and this works just fine, however I wanted to know if there was basically a way to accomplish the sortable columns without pagination some other way such as 'limit' => unlimited or another Component of CakePHP that would accomplish this.

Here’s the Controller:

class GroupsController extends AppController {

    public function view($slug = null) {

        $group = $this->Group->findBySlug($slug);

        $this->paginate = array(
            'Person' => array(
                'conditions' => array('Person.group_id' => $group["Group"]['id']),
                'limit' => 100,
                'recursive' => 0
            )
        );

        $people = $this->paginate('Person');

        $this->set('people', $people);

    }
}        

Here’s the view:

<table>
    <tr>
        <th><?php echo $this->Paginator->sort('Person.id','Id'); ?></th>         
        <th><?php echo $this->Paginator->sort('first_name', 'First Name'); ?></th>         
        <th><?php echo $this->Paginator->sort('last_name', 'Last Name'); ?></th>         
    </tr>
    <!-- Here is where we loop through the people -->
    <?php foreach ($people as $person): ?>
    <tr>
        <td><?php echo $person['Person']['id']; ?></td>
        <td><?php echo $person['Person']['first_name']; ?></td>
        <td><?php echo $person['Person']['last_name']; ?></td>
    </tr>
    <?php endforeach; ?>
    <?php unset($player); ?>
</table>

Answer 1

It’s the pagination component that handles the column sorting. If you don’t want to use the paginator (why not?) you’ll have to write your own code to do it.

One minor tweak you could do to your code is:

'limit' => $this->Group->find('count')

Which will ensure you always have enough of limit to display the full table.