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GraphQL Topic: Pagination in GraphQL

Introduction

Pagination is a common feature in APIs that return large amounts of data. In GraphQL, pagination can be achieved using a combination of arguments and return types.

Main Content

There are several ways to implement pagination in GraphQL, including using cursors, offsets, and limit/offset combinations.

One approach is to use cursor-based pagination, which involves passing a cursor (usually an opaque string) that points to the start of the next page of data. The cursor is returned in the previous page's response and can be used to fetch the next page of data.

Cursor-based pagination has several strengths compared to offset-based pagination. For example:

• Cursor-based pagination is more resilient to data changes than offset-based pagination. If data is added or deleted between two offset-based queries, the offset values will be shifted and may result in missing or duplicate data. Cursor-based pagination avoids this problem by using opaque cursors that are independent of the underlying data.
• Cursor-based pagination supports more efficient queries than offset-based pagination. For example, a query that returns the 100th page of results in an offset-based pagination scheme would require scanning the first 99 pages of data. In contrast, a cursor-based query that returns the 100th page can skip directly to the appropriate point in the data.

However, cursor-based pagination also has some weaknesses compared to offset-based pagination. For example:

• Cursor-based pagination may require more server-side state than offset-based pagination. The server needs to maintain the cursor values for each query and may need to perform additional queries to fetch the data associated with each cursor.
• Cursor-based pagination may be less familiar to developers than offset-based pagination, which is a more common pagination scheme in traditional APIs.

Another approach is to use limit/offset pagination, which involves passing a limit (the maximum number of items to return) and an offset (the number of items to skip before starting to return results).

In GraphQL, we can define custom types for these pagination approaches and include them as fields on our queries.

Conclusion

Implementing pagination in GraphQL can be done in several ways, depending on the requirements of your application. By defining custom pagination types and including them as fields on your queries, you can build a flexible and powerful API that can handle large amounts of data.

Additional Resources

• GraphQL Cursor Connections Specification
• GraphQL Pagination in Apollo Server