Imagine that you have a recordset containing 100 records, for example. Usually you wouldn't want to display all 100 records at once, as it's far too much information for a web site visitor to take in at once, and it can also make your web pages slow to load. Instead, it's much more desirable to be able to show the user 10 records at a time for example, and let them move back and forth between pages. A perfect example of this is a search engine such as Google, although it can be used on any web site that uses dynamic data.

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Happy New Year everyone! Welcome to my first tutorial of 2004, on Recordset Paging.  

What is Recordset Paging?

Imagine that you have a recordset containing 100 records, for example. Usually you wouldn't want to display all 100 records at once, as it's far too much information for a web site visitor to take in at once, and it can also make your web pages slow to load.  Instead, it's much more desirable to be able to show the user 10 records at a time for example, and let them move back and forth between pages. A perfect example of this is a search engine such as Google, although it can be used on any web site that uses dynamic data.

Step 1 - Creating some Example Data

Before we can start the tutorial, we need some example data to work with.  For some test data we'll use a list of the last 17 articles published in the PHP section of the DMX Zone Premium Content section.

We'll create a simple table for use with this example with the following structure, called example_data.

CREATE TABLE example_data (
  id int(8) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  title varchar(250) NOT NULL default '',
  author varchar(250) NOT NULL default '',
  date datetime NOT NULL default '0000-00-00 00:00:00',
  PRIMARY KEY  (id)
) TYPE=MyISAM;

This has a unique id field that's setup as a primary key, and as an auto increment field. We have two fields set up to hold the title of the article, and the author's name, and a field to hold the article's publication date. We've used a datetime format for this field as it makes it much easier to order the records in date order (see the series on Creating Calendars in PHP for more details on this).

Below are some of the example records, so that you can see the type of data we will be working with. You can download an SQL script which can be run on an empty MySQL database and will create the data and table, from the "Code download" link in the blue properties box.

Now that we have some example data to work with, we'll move on and first of all, we'll look at displaying the data on the page. Before we do that however, we need to create a PHP include file containing the database connection details.