David Cramer's Blog

Python, Django, and Scale.

A Better Paginator in Django

One of the tasks that I seem to repeatedly do across multiple projects, is extend the built-in paginator from Django. The built-in is fairly nice, but it’s quite honestly extremely confusing as you have to pass around a paginator instance as well as a paginator.page() instance in order to get useful pagination inside of a template.

After the Nth time of someone coming up with questions about the paginator, and seeing Brian Rosner’s not-very-smart “smart_page_range” code (his words, not mine!), I figured it might be useful to throw this out to the public.

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from django.core.paginator import QuerySetPaginator, InvalidPage

__all__ = ('BetterQuerySetPaginator', 'InvalidPage')

class BetterQuerySetPaginator(QuerySetPaginator):
"""
An enhanced version of the QuerySetPaginator.

>>> my_objects = BetterQuerySetPaginator(queryset, 25)
>>> page = 1
>>> context = {
>>>     'my_objects': my_objects.get_context(page),
>>> }
"""
def get_context(self, page, range_gap=5):
try:
page = int(page)
except (ValueError, TypeError), exc:
raise InvalidPage, exc

if page > 5:
start = page-range_gap
else:
start = 1

if page < self.num_pages-range_gap:
end = page+range_gap+1
else:
end = self.num_pages+1

paginator = self.page(page)

context = {
'page_range': range(start, end),
'objects': paginator.object_list,
'num_pages': self.num_pages,
'page': page,
'has_previous': paginator.has_previous(),
'has_next': paginator.has_next(),
'previous_page': paginator.previous_page_number(),
'next_page': paginator.next_page_number(),
'is_first': page == 1,
'is_last': page == self.num_pages,
}

<p>return context

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