paging-and-sorting.adoc

Paging and Sorting

This section documents Spring Data REST’s usage of the Spring Data Repository paging and sorting abstractions. To familiarize yourself with those features, see the Spring Data documentation for the repository implementation you use (such as Spring Data JPA).

Paging

Rather than return everything from a large result set, Spring Data REST recognizes some URL parameters that influence the page size and the starting page number.

If you extend PagingAndSortingRepository<T, ID> and access the list of all entities, you get links to the first 20 entities. To set the page size to any other number, add a size parameter, as follows:

http://localhost:8080/people/?size=5

The preceding example sets the page size to 5.

To use paging in your own query methods, you need to change the method signature to accept an additional Pageable parameter and return a Page rather than a List. For example, the following query method is exported to /people/search/nameStartsWith and supports paging:

@RestResource(path = "nameStartsWith", rel = "nameStartsWith")
public Page findByNameStartsWith(@Param("name") String name, Pageable p);

The Spring Data REST exporter recognizes the returned Page and gives you the results in the body of the response, just as it would with a non-paged response, but additional links are added to the resource to represent the previous and next pages of data.

Previous and Next Links

Each paged response returns links to the previous and next pages of results based on the current page by using the IANA-defined link relations prev and next. If you are currently at the first page of results, however, no prev link is rendered. For the last page of results, no next link is rendered.

Consider the following example, where we set the page size to 5:

curl localhost:8080/people?size=5

{
  "_links" : {
    "self" : {
      "href" : "http://localhost:8080/persons{&sort,page,size}", (1)
      "templated" : true
    },
    "next" : {
      "href" : "http://localhost:8080/persons?page=1&size=5{&sort}", (2)
      "templated" : true
    }
  },
  "_embedded" : {
  	... data ...
  },
  "page" : { (3)
    "size" : 5,
    "totalElements" : 50,
    "totalPages" : 10,
    "number" : 0
  }
}

At the top, we see _links:

1. The self link serves up the whole collection with some options.

2. The next link points to the next page, assuming the same page size.

3. At the bottom is extra data about the page settings, including the size of a page, total elements, total pages, and the page number you are currently viewing.

Note	When using tools such as curl on the command line, if you have a ampersand (&) in your statement, you need to wrap the whole URI in quotation marks.

Note that the self and next URIs are, in fact, URI templates. They accept not only size, but also page and sort as optional flags.

As mentioned earlier, the bottom of the HAL document includes a collection of details about the page. This extra information makes it easy for you to configure UI tools like sliders or indicators to reflect the user’s overall position when they view the data. For example, the document in the preceding example shows we are looking at the first page (with page numbers starting at 0).

The following example shows What happens when we follow the next link:

$ curl "http://localhost:8080/persons?page=1&size=5"

{
  "_links" : {
    "self" : {
      "href" : "http://localhost:8080/persons{&sort,projection,page,size}",
      "templated" : true
    },
    "next" : {
      "href" : "http://localhost:8080/persons?page=2&size=5{&sort,projection}", (1)
      "templated" : true
    },
    "prev" : {
      "href" : "http://localhost:8080/persons?page=0&size=5{&sort,projection}", (2)
      "templated" : true
    }
  },
  "_embedded" : {
	... data ...
  },
  "page" : {
    "size" : 5,
    "totalElements" : 50,
    "totalPages" : 10,
    "number" : 1 (3)
  }
}

This looks very similar, except for the following differences:

1. The next link now points to yet another page, indicating its relative perspective to the self link.

2. A prev link now appears, giving us a path to the previous page.

3. The current number is now 1 (indicating the second page).

This feature lets you map optional buttons on the screen to these hypermedia controls, letting you implement navigational features for the UI experience without having to hard code the URIs. In fact, the user can be empowered to pick from a list of page sizes, dynamically changing the content served, without having to rewrite the next and `prev controls at the top or bottom.

Sorting

Spring Data REST recognizes sorting parameters that use the repository sorting support.

To have your results sorted on a particular property, add a sort URL parameter with the name of the property on which you want to sort the results. You can control the direction of the sort by appending a comma (,) to the the property name plus either asc or desc. The following would use the findByNameStartsWith query method defined on the PersonRepository for all Person entities with names starting with the letter “K” and add sort data that orders the results on the name property in descending order:

curl -v "http://localhost:8080/people/search/nameStartsWith?name=K&sort=name,desc"

To sort the results by more than one property, keep adding as many sort=PROPERTY parameters as you need. They are added to the Pageable in the order in which they appear in the query string. Results can be sorted by top-level and nested properties. Use property path notation to express a nested sort property. Sorting by linkable associations (that is, links to top-level resources) is not supported.