The recipe, Implementing a custom find type, showed us the power of extending the built-in model find types, including support to use the implemented custom types for fetching records or counting them.
Now that we know how to fetch and count custom find types, we can easily paginate a set of resulting rows. This recipe shows how to use CakePHP's built-in pagination support to paginate a set of rows that come as a result of a custom find type.
We need some sample models and data to work with, and we need the override of the find() method in AppModel to allow count operations on custom find types. Therefore, make sure you follow the entire recipe, Implementing a custom find type, including its Getting ready section.
- Create a file named
posts_controller.phpin yourapp/controllersfolder. If you already have one, make sure itsindex()method is as follows:<?php class PostsController extends AppController { public function index() { $this->paginate['Post'] = array( 'search', 'fields' => array( 'Post.id', 'Post.title' ), 'terms' => array( 'Post 1', 'Post 2' ), 'limit' => 3 ); $posts = $this->paginate('Post'), $this->set(compact('posts')); } } ?> - Create the view for the
indexaction. If you don't have a folder namedpostsin yourapp/viewsfolder, create it. Next, create a file namedindex.ctpin yourapp/viewsfolder with the following contents:<p> <?php echo $this->Paginator->prev(); ?> <?php echo $this->Paginator->numbers(); ?> <?php echo $this->Paginator->next(); ?> </p> <ul> <?php foreach($posts as $post) { ?> <li>#<?php echo $post['Post']['id']; ?>: <?php echo $post['Post']['title']; ?></li> <?php } ?> </ul> - If we now browse to
http://localhost/posts, we see a paginated list of matching posts, showing the first three posts out of two pages, as shown in the following screenshot:
To paginate a custom find type, we need to specify the name of the find type as the value for index 0 of the pagination settings (or the first value if no index is defined). We can then pass any custom find settings as part of the pagination settings, as shown in the following code snippet:
$this->paginate['Post'] = array(
'search',
'terms' => array(
'Post 1',
'Post 2'
),
'limit' => 3
);
CakePHP's paginate() method will first issue a count (specifying the find type name in the type find setting) to get the total number of rows, and then a find operation using the custom find type to get the rows for the current page.