API pagination best practices

Question

I\'d love some some help handling a strange edge case with a paginated API I\'m building.

Like many APIs, this one paginates large results. If you query /foos, you\'

Answer 1

It may be tough to find best practices since most systems with APIs don't accommodate for this scenario, because it is an extreme edge, or they don't typically delete records (Facebook, Twitter). Facebook actually says each "page" may not have the number of results requested due to filtering done after pagination. https://developers.facebook.com/blog/post/478/

If you really need to accommodate this edge case, you need to "remember" where you left off. jandjorgensen suggestion is just about spot on, but I would use a field guaranteed to be unique like the primary key. You may need to use more than one field.

Following Facebook's flow, you can (and should) cache the pages already requested and just return those with deleted rows filtered if they request a page they had already requested.