Pagination Project — Building a Complete Paginated API

In this tutorial, you will learn about Pagination Project. We cover key concepts, practical examples, and best practices to help you master this topic.

This capstone project combines all previous lessons to build a complete paginated, filterable, and sortable API for a product catalog with 100,000 products.

Project Overview

Build a product catalog API with:

• Offset pagination for first 10 pages, cursor pagination beyond
• Filtering by category, price range, in-stock status
• Sorting by price, name, rating, creation date
• Full-text search across name and description
• Database indexes for all filterable and sortable columns

Implementation

app.get("/api/products", async (req, res) => {
  const {
    page, cursor, limit,
    category, price_min, price_max, in_stock,
    search, sort
  } = req.query;

  const effectiveLimit = Math.min(parseInt(limit) || 20, 100);

  // Choose pagination method
  if (cursor) {
    return cursorPaginate(req, res);
  }

  const page_num = parseInt(page) || 1;

  // Switch to cursor after page 10
  if (page_num > 10) {
    return cursorPaginate(req, res);
  }

  return offsetPaginate(req, res);
});

Checklist

• Offset pagination with page/limit paramaters
• Cursor pagination with base64-encoded tokens
• Filtering by category, price range, stock status
• Multi-field sorting with whitelist validation
• Full-text search with ILIKE or tsvector
• Database indexes on all filtered/sorted columns
• Pagination metadata in response body
• Link headers for navigation

Challenge

Implement all features and test with a dataset of 100,000 records. Verify performance at different page depths.