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Pagination class is very useful when we are handling a very large set of data. With it, users can see a page of data sets for only 10 or 20 rows and provided with page navigation where user can go to the next and previous page or directly jump to a page number. CodeIgniter has a class for doing this, but we must make a link to the data to be paginated to make it works correctly.

This article show you how to make the link between pagination class and database class to make the pagination works on a table that has a large set of data inside it.

First, in your controller class, load the pagination class and the database class (if it was not automatically loaded by the the autoload.php configuration). In this example I use  a controller named Units that handle data from a table called units. It has 4 columns: id, name, imei, and owner.

Then at the index method of the class, first we read the value of the third segment of the URI which is the current offset number to a variable called $offset. If the segment is empty the we set the value as 0.

Then we do the query to the units table to retrieve it’s records. Before retrieving the records, we set the limit and offset by calling db->limit() method. Setting this will limit our query result only $limit records starting from record number $offset.

Next we set the configuration for the pagination class, which are the base_url that points to the current controller itself, total_rows that is the number of all rows of the table, and per_page that is the number of rows per page to display read by calling the db->count_all() method. Then we create the pagination links by calling the pagination->create_links() method.

Then we fill up an array variable $data that contains the $query result of the table and the $paginator links. After that, we pass the data to the view.

In the view, we render the $query result into a table and print the pagination link at the bottom of the table.

Notice that in the view I put a link to create a new record that point to “units/add” URL. This is useful for adding new record and should be handled by other method in the units controller. Also I created links for deleting and editing each records, each pointing to “units/delete” and “units/edit”.

Note: the above example is only for simplicity purpose. In the real world you should use model class to access to databases.

Here is the complete list of our controller above:

This is the screen shot of our controller called with http://localhost/index.php/units/index.

And here is the URL if we click the second page http://localhost/index.php/units/index/10 and the result.

To make the table nice I used CSS table style from http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/08/13/top-10-css-table-designs/.