Dynamic pagination using Generic ListView

Question

I have a requirement that a user should be able to choose how many items per page he wants to see in a list of assistants. I am using a generic ListView in Django 1.4.

Answer 1

I just recently had to do this. You can override the get_paginate_by function to grab a query string parameter. Here's a basic example.

Class AssistantList(ListView):
    template_name = "register/assistant_list.html"
    context_object_name = 'assistant_list'
    paginate_by = 25

    def get_paginate_by(self, queryset):
        """
        Paginate by specified value in querystring, or use default class property value.
        """
        return self.request.GET.get('paginate_by', self.paginate_by)

Then in our html we have a dropdown selection where the user can choose the number of items to view.

    
        25
        50
        75
        100
    

We added some javascript to make it auto-submit and you'll want to pass the paginate_by through to the context so you can make sure it continues to get passed from page to page.