Learn Web Development with Python

Understanding pagination

So far, we have been working with a database that has just a few rows, and therefore, the HTTP GET requests to the different resource collections for our RESTful Web Service don't have problems with the amount of data in the JSON body of the responses. However, this situation changes as the number of rows in the database tables increases.

Let's imagine we have 300 rows in the drones_pilots table that persists pilots. We don't want to retrieve the data for 300 pilots whenever we make an HTTP GET request to localhost:8000/pilots/. Instead, we just take advantage of the pagination features available in the Django REST framework to make it easy to specify how we want the large result sets to be split into individual pages ...