PHP Recordset Paging

Imagine that you have a recordset containing 100 records, for example. Usually you wouldn't want to display all 100 records at once, as it's far too much information for a web site visitor to take in at once, and it can also make your web pages slow to load. Instead, it's much more desirable to be able to show the user 10 records at a time for example, and let them move back and forth between pages. A perfect example of this is a search engine such as Google, although it can be used on any web site that uses dynamic data.

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4.3 Creating a Dynamic Navigation Bar

Creating a navigation bar is actually quite easy, and is achieved by adding the following block of PHP code beneath the main PHP code block at the top of the page.

<?php
// Create Dynamic Navigation Bar
$pageURL = $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'];
$html = "";
if($currentPage > 1){
     // Create Previous Page Link (<<)
     $url = $pageURL . "?page=" . ($currentPage - 1);
     $html .= "<a href='" .  $url . "'> << </a>";
     $html .= "&nbsp;";
}
for($i=1; $i <= $totalPageNumber; $i++){
     // Create Numerical Page Links ( 1 2 3 etc )
     $url = $pageURL . "?page=" . $i;
     $html .= "<a href='" .  $url . "'>" . $i . "</a>";
     $html .= "&nbsp;";
}
if($currentPage < $totalPageNumber){
     // Create Next Page Link (>>)
     $url = $pageURL . "?page=" . ($currentPage + 1);
     $html .= "<a href='" .  $url . "'> >> </a>";
     $html .= "&nbsp;";
}
?>

Code Block 7 - Code to create a Dynamic Navigation Bar

As usual, we'll go through this code block by block.

// Create Dynamic Navigation Bar
$pageURL = $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'];
$html = "";

First, we use the special server variable $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'] to get the name of the current page, which we place in the variable $pageURL, so that we can use this in the navigation links. We then setup an empty variable called $html which were going to use to store the HTML for the navigation bar.

if($currentPage > 1){
     // Create Previous Page Link (<<)
     $url = $pageURL . "?page=" . ($currentPage - 1);
     $html .= "<a href='" .  $url . "'> << </a>";
     $html .= "&nbsp;";
}

We then check to see if the current page number is greater than 1, meaning we're not on the first page of records. If this is the case, we create a link to the previous page ($currentPage - 1) and construct a URL in the form script_name.php?page=page_number. We add a &nbsp; (non blanking space) to separate it from the page number that will be next to it.

for($i=1; $i <= $totalPageNumber; $i++){
     // Create Numerical Page Links ( 1 2 3 etc )
     $url = $pageURL . "?page=" . $i;
     $html .= "<a href='" .  $url . "'>" . $i . "</a>";
     $html .= "&nbsp;";
}

Next, we use a for loop, which will run once for every page number, and creates a link where the URL parameter page is set to the relevant page number e.g.

script_name.php?page=1

script_name.php?page=2

script_name.php?page=3

etc&

if($currentPage < $totalPageNumber){
     // Create Next Page Link (>>)
     $url = $pageURL . "?page=" . ($currentPage + 1);
     $html .= "<a href='" .  $url . "'> >> </a>";
     $html .= "&nbsp;";
}

Finally, we check that we're not on the last page of records, and if we're not we create a link where the page parameter is set to the current page number + 1, to take the user to the next page.

At this stage, we now have the complete HTML code for the navigation bar in the variable $html, and all we need to do is to echo this to the browser in our chosen position by adding the following PHP code.

<?php echo $html; ?>

Save the page before you move on.