Question

So I’m trying to find a way to return a very large result set from a query, and display it as a paginated table on a web page.

For example, if I am trying to return 1,000 items from my database, I’d like to display them in a paginated table, 100 at a time, and only query those 100 items.

When a user enters a name to query in a search box, I’d like them to be able to click through the table paginations, where each pagination only queries for 100 items, so ‘page’ 1 displays items 1-100, ‘page’ 2 displays items 101-200, etc…

I’d like to do this because querying a very large result set and then just paginating the display is very slow.

Does anyone have any advice on how to do this using PHP and MySQL?

I have the Pagination working fine, I just can’t figure out how to run my queries.

Here is the query I have now:

 mysql_query("SELECT name, age, address FROM users  WHERE name='$name' AND domain_name='$age' LIMIT 100", $localDB);

How do I use this query to return only resultset 101-200, 201-300, etc…?

Answer 1

If you already know the quantities (numbers) for the pagination, then just put a limit on your SQL.

Example using PDO:

//url passed has a token of &page=[digit]
//Do prior error checking to verify $_GET/POST has a page variable, and it is a digit.

if ($page < 1) { $page = 1;}

$offset=$limit*($page-1); // Will give an offset of 100 on page 1, or 200 on page 2, etc


$sql = "SELECT `items` FROM items_db WHERE itemno=:itemno LIMIT :offset, 100";

$sql_query = $conn->prepare($sql); // Existing connection
$sql_query->bindParam(':itemno',$itemno, PDO::PARAM_INT);
$sql_query->bindParam(':offset', $offset, PDO::PARAM_INT);

$sql_query->execute();