Support Link headers (rfc8288) for next/previous/first/last page

[rv2931]

Problem

A convenient way of managing pagination in addition to Range/Content-Range is to add links to next/previous/first/last page just like https://jsonapi.org/ standard
it allows to "dummy" client to parse easely all pages just by testing the presence (or null) of link to "next" page for example. if missing or null means that we've reach the last page. in the same way, previous is null or absent when reaching the first page

Solution

I was looking for a way to implement this complementary solution and I've found the RFC8288 Web Linking defining Link http header that permit to add links in a rfc conform way

Proposition could be

Request header:
Range-Unit: items
Range: 0-9

Response header:

Content-Range: 0-9/141   
Link: http;//<....>, rel="first", range=0-9
Link: http;//<....>, rel="last", range=140-149
Link: http;//<....>, rel="next", range=10-19
Link: null, rel="previous" (or absent as current page is first page)

for items/limit/offset two solutions are presently available : limit/offset as query parameters and Range header parameter
RFC8288 allows query parameters as it allows full http link
Link: http;//domain/api/v1/resource?offset=10&limit=10, rel="next"
It is not explicitly defined that parameters can be used as header parameters but it could be:
Link: http;//domain/api/v1/resource, Range=10-19, rel="next"

[steve-chavez]

it allows to "dummy" client to parse easely all pages

Curious, what type of clients have builtin support for rel=next?

[rv2931]

it allows to "dummy" client to parse easely all pages

Curious, what type of clients have builtin support for rel=next?

I'm now persuaded that there is no real standard for content format, neither for pagination, neither for filters. There are officially some srabdatds but no one is W3C standard and even when applied the field names are generally something custom
So I don't believe that it exists a client that have any built-in support for any standard except having specific connector for specific API supplier
No here is more to ease parsing and walking through pages. With link headers you can do recursive and simple function like "while next exists or next is not null then get(next)"
For power I for example it is more easy to do that
Concerning "standards" JSON:api abd Hal+JSON propose these links Management but as I said I don't know any client that implement any API standards for what I know. (I don't know lots of and I'm interested if you know some)
Maybe ODATA, OpenDataSoft or ElesticSearch are the only one where data producter has to conform strictly to a standard and tools like powerbi and so one have connectors but I'm not sure it is a W3C standard and again these are custom and private standards and so dedicated connectors as they supply dedicated commercial products

[rv2931]

But I'm wondering that as soon as postgrest+openapi or supabase/postgrest+openapi will have its own connectors in powerbi, qlik sens and other dataviz products every little projects will conform to postgrest standard as it is simple to implement even on non postgresql db. ODATA, json:api and hal+json are aui complexe to implement and so only big projects implement them

[rv2931]

I implement the postgREST pagination standard (Range/Content-Range) on a personnal Python/FastAPI project and rebasing on the HTTP standard. I have implemented the multi-range request Range: items=0-9, 100-109
This confirms the interest of postgREST standard as you can activate the pagination or not just by adding Range header or not, it is really convenient and flex wihtout brekaing data format. Really cool !
This multi-range header make me ask how to manage multi range AND the concept of first/previous/next/last link
To generate a link, ideally you need to:

• define a standard range (page size) but if you have multiple range, wich one you take ? the first ? the smaller ? one set of link for each range ?
• decide if you have multi-range request, did you return multi set of links or as this make non sense to have multiple link set, you supply only links for the first range or maybe no link set at all ?

One solution could be to take the first range, with the first range size or with the server standard range size
The solution not to supply links as it is diffucult to select a range and could cause duplication of data as it will walk through to data that have already been accessed by previous multi range request