Pagination function

Question

I'm trying to make a pagination script made by Jonathan Sampson (gotta give credit for his excellent video tutorials) into a function, so that I don't have to have to write it on every page I want pagination on, so I can use it all over my site without having pagination code on every page :)

I thought I'd pass the query with the function and it works good:

function pagination_query($query, $table = false, $column = false)
{

// Create some variables
$pageNumber = (isset($_GET['page']) && is_numeric($_GET['page'])) ? $_GET['page'] : 1;

// Establish number of results per page
$perPage = 5;

// Establish a padding value
$padding = 3;

// Get Start index of results
$startIndex = ($pageNumber * $perPage) - $perPage;

// Get total number of database entries
$totalCount = "SELECT COUNT(*) as 'Total' FROM $table $column";
$rsCount = mysql_query($totalCount) or die (mysql_error());
$rowCount = mysql_fetch_object($rsCount);

----- non essential stuff removed -----

// Get page results
$sql = "$query 
        LIMIT $startIndex, $perPage";
// Get result set
$query = mysql_query($sql) or die(mysql_error());

return $query;
}

In use:

$query = pagination_query("SELECT id, message 
FROM posts WHERE topicid = 1 
ORDER BY id", 'posts', 'WHERE topicid = 1');


if (mysql_num_rows($query)> 0) {
// Show the results
while($row = mysql_fetch_object($query)) {
print "<div>";
print $row->id;
print ": ";
print substr($row->message, 0, strrpos(substr($row->message, 0, 50), ' ')) . '...';
print "</div>";
} 
}

I just figured out that with this, I can only print the links in one place on the page. Any ideas?

What do you guys think of my solution? Is there a smarter and better way?

Answer 1

You should really use a library specialised on this instead of writing own code. One example is the PEAR Pager.