CakePHP outputting redundant pagination link on last page

Question

I'm using a custom pagination template with CakePHP 3.7

The template is in config/infinite-scroll-paginator.php. I want to use this with the Infinite Scroll jquery plugin. Therefore all that's required is 1 link per paginated page which contains the URL to the "next" page (i.e. next set of results).

So in the file above I have:

$config = [
    'nextActive' => '<a class="pagination__next" aria-label="Next" href="{{url}}">{{text}}</a>'
];

In my Controller I start by telling it to use the custom pagination template:

public $helpers = [
    'Paginator' => ['templates' => 'infinite-scroll-paginator']
];

Then when I want to paginate my data I use a custom finder (findFilters() which is in Model/Table/FiltersTable.php):

public $paginate = [
    'finder' => 'filters',
];

I can then use this to get paginated data:

$this->loadModel('Filters');
$rf_keywords = trim($this->request->getQuery('rf_keywords'));

// Pagination
$page = $this->request->getQuery('page') ? (int)$this->request->getQuery('page') : 1;
$this->paginate = ['page' => $page, 'limit' => 100];

$finder = $this
    ->Filters
    ->find('filters', [
        'rf_keywords' => $rf_keywords
    ]);

$data = $this->paginate($finder);
$this->set('data', $data);

Then in my template I output the paginator HTML:

<?= $this->Paginator->next(); ?>

All of this works fine. I get a "next" link for each page. Say if I have 10 pages I get URL's:

/get-filters/?page=1
/get-filters/?page=2
...
/get-filters/?page=10

The issue is that on the 10th page there is a "next" link and the URL of it is just

/get-filters

There are no more pages to output but I still get a link, albeit an invalid one.

How can I stop it from outputting the link on the last page? I thought that the paginator component would take care of this since it's aware how many pages there are based on my limit value in $this->paginate?

Debug the helper's code to figure out what's happening. ps, infinite scrolling is one of the most annoying things ever invented ;) — ndm
@ndm thanks I'll check that out. In this particular application it's a list of >1000 filters that a user can subscribe/unsubscribe from by clicking on an icon next to each one. Bearing in mind the number of records we're paginating the result set and then using Infinite Scroll to load more data. Arguably this is less annoying than having to click "next page" bearing in mind the user is already doing a lot of clicking. I agree with you that in general it's undesirable, and if you have any better UI pattern ideas for this I'm interested to hear :) — Andy

Andy Andy · Accepted Answer · 2019-08-15T08:36:39

Use $this->Paginator->hasNext() which returns true or false depending on whether there is a "next page".

In the template:

<?php if ($this->Paginator->hasNext()): ?>
<?= $this->Paginator->next(); ?>
<?php endif; ?>

CakePHP outputting redundant pagination link on last page

1 Answers