Item's page and will_paginate

Question

I have some photos that are split on successive pages through will_paginate plugin. When you open a photo and then return to all photos using a link, you always return to the first page (e.g. the photo is displayed on page 5, you open the photo, click a link to show all photos and expect that you are on page 5 again, but you are on page 1).

Now, is there any method to get the page number to which a photo belongs to?

I tried to pass a GET parameter, but this only works if the user doesn't perform any more actions (e.g. post a comment, edit photo, ecc.).

Answer 1

The page number is highly dependent on the results of your search. Your search might have 1, 10, or 100 pages depending on the result set and the number of items per page.

Any link to "show all photos" could contain the search and pagination information, using the GET parameters as you've described. Or store and retrieve via a cookie so that the search results persist until the users clears or selects a new search.

Answer 2

page = (number_of_records_before_RECORD / number_of_pages) + 1

In other words. If you photo has ID 40 and there are 25 records before (assuming some records has been deleted), with 20 records per page:

page = (25 / 20) + 1 = 2

You can count the number of records before selected record using Model.count(:conditions => ['id < ?', record.id], :order => 'id'). The right query depends on which sorting filter you apply to that table when listing all objects.