Paging Alternatives

Question

I'm working on a project that returns paged results with volumes potentially in the hundreds of pages. I've been playing around with more usable ways to perform paging than the standard fisrt/last/next/previous links and jump-to text box. One alternative I had was to have a scrolling list of pages. I'd display 5 to 7 links at a time, centered around the current page, but add onhover actions to buttons on either side to scroll through the numbered list. This allows users to jump way ahead in the page count if they like without the combersome "Jump to" textbox. Does anyone have any better ideas?

If not, I'm trying to decide on a way to implement the above functionality, but I'm not sure how to display only a section of a div (with the div being the full list of links.) Any ideas?

Answer 1

Depending on the data you can categorize it different ways and display an index. Pages is one way. Calendar is another, etc..

basically Master/Detail view.

Answer 2

Another option is to use a slider control that displays the current page (and/or record range) numbers in a caption bubble.

Answer 3

You could use a dropdown list containing page numbers.

Answer 4

You might find Endless Pageless an interesting read.