Case Study: Previous and Next Browsing
The subject of this section is a case study that uses the concepts we have discussed so far in this chapter. We show how to develop page browsing tools to display results over several pages and permit users to move between these pages. We develop this code as a generic, reusable module. A modified version of the code is used in the winestore, and the winestore browsing code is included in Chapter 13.
The aim of our case study is to show how to display large result sets in pages. Each page should be able to be displayed efficiently and viewed without using the web browser’s vertical scroll bar. We also aim to make the component intuitive to use, allow direct access to any page in the results, and allow pages to be navigated using previous and next hypertext links.
We develop the module step-by-step. We begin by developing support for multiple results pages, and the previous and next links. Later in this section, we add functionality to display page numbers as links that permit direct access to a chosen page. The output of the final version of the module when it is used to browse winestore regions is shown in Figure 5-8.
Figure 5-8. A generic page browsing tool with previous and next links
In this section, as a generic page-based browser is developed, we
retire the special-purpose displayWinesList( )
function completed in Example 5-6. It’s replaced ...
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