Previous
Chapter 18
Paging and Sorting
Paging or pagination is a technique to split large result sets into more viewable Web pages. For example, if a business method returns a collection of 300 transfer objects, it is more sensible to display 10 or 20 results each time because the user screen space is limited and because sending all the results requires the transfer of a larger chunk of data. To view the other objects, the user can click on the Next link. Also, for easier user access, you can provide page numbers in each page so that the user can navigate to any page he/she desires. This chapter discusses various solutions to displaying large amount of data. For more effective discussions, we group the problems into two categories: working with large collections of data and working with very large collections of data. This chapter also introduces the Display Tag Library, a highly popular open source library that contains tags for displaying table data. Among others, the Display Tag Library’s tags support paging and sorting.