Pagination and Sorting With Spring Data JPA

Overview

While dealing with a large amount of data, lazy processing is often essential. Even if a service returns a huge amount of data, the consumer is less likely to use it. Consider a shopping website where a customer searches for a product and the website has thousands of products to display. Fetching thousands of products and displaying them on a web page will be very time-consuming. In most cases, the customer may not even look at all of the products.

For such cases, a technique called Pagination is used. Only a small subset of products (page) is displayed at first and the customer can ask to see the next subset (page) and so on.

To learn the basics of JPA and Spring Data JPA, check out these links:

• Hands-on Spring Data JPA (A Spring Data JPA Learning Series)
• What is JPA, Spring Data and Spring Data JPA

Entity

For the sake of this tutorial, we will consider the simplest example of the Employee entity. Below is the  Employee entity class.

@Entity
public class Employee {
    @Id private Long name;

    private String firstName;
    private String lastName;
    private Date dateOfBirth;
    private Integer age;
    private String designation;
    private double salary;
    private Date dateOfJoining;

    public Long getName() {
        return name;
    }

    public void setName(Long name) {
        this.name = name;
    }

    public String getFirstName() {
        return firstName;
    }

    public void setFirstName(String firstName) {
        this.firstName = firstName;
    }

    public String getLastName() {
        return lastName;
    }

    public void setLastName(String lastName) {
        this.lastName = lastName;
    }

    public Date getDateOfBirth() {
        return dateOfBirth;
    }

    public void setDateOfBirth(Date dateOfBirth) {
        this.dateOfBirth = dateOfBirth;
    }

    public Integer getAge() {
        return age;
    }

    public void setAge(Integer age) {
        this.age = age;
    }

    public String getDesignation() {
        return designation;
    }

    public void setDesignation(String designation) {
        this.designation = designation;
    }

    public double getSalary() {
        return salary;
    }

    public void setSalary(double salary) {
        this.salary = salary;
    }

    public Date getDateOfJoining() {
        return dateOfJoining;
    }

    public void setDateOfJoining(Date dateOfJoining) {
        this.dateOfJoining = dateOfJoining;
    }
}

Want to learn more about using the Java Persistence API (JPA) with Spring and Spring Boot?

Check out these additional links:

• Spring Boot with Spring Data JPA
• Spring Data JPA Composite Key with @EmbeddedId
• Spring Data JPA find by @EmbeddedId Partially
• Java Persistence API Guide
• Spring Data JPA Query Methods

Employee Repository

In the article Spring Data JPA Query Methods , we have already learned about Spring repository interfaces and query methods. Here, we need to learn Pagination, so we will use Spring’s   PagingAndSortingRepository .

@Repository
public interface EmployeeRepository extends PagingAndSortingRepository<Employee, Long> {

    Page<Employee> findAll(Pageable pageable);

    Page<Employee> findByFirstName(String firstName, Pageable pageable);

    Slice<Employee> findByFirstNameAndLastName(String firstName, String lastName, Pageable pageable);
}

Pagination

Have a look at the EmployeeRepository . The method accepts  Pageable   arguments.  Pageable is an interface defined by Spring, which holds a PageRequest . Let’s see how to create a  PageRequest .

Pageable pageable = PageRequest.of(0, 10);
Page<Employee> page = employeeRepository.findAll(pageable);

In the first line, we created a PageRequest of 10 employees and asked for the first (0) page. The page request was passed to  findAll to get a page of Employees as a response.

If we want to access the next set of subsequent pages, we can increase the page number every time.

PageRequest.of(1, 10);
PageRequest.of(2, 10);
PageRequest.of(3, 10);
...

Sorting

Spring Data JPAprovides a  Sort   object in order to provide a sorting mechanism. Let's have a look at the ways of sorting.

employeeRepository.findAll(Sort.by("fistName"));

employeeRepository.findAll(Sort.by("fistName").ascending().and(Sort.by("lastName").descending());

Obviously, the first one simply sorts by ‘firstName’ and the other one sorts by ‘firstName’ ascending and ‘lastName’ descending.

Pagination and Sort Together

Pageable pageable = PageRequest.of(0, 20, Sort.by("firstName"));


Pageable pageable = PageRequest.of(0, 20, Sort.by("fistName").ascending().and(Sort.by("lastName").descending());

Slice Vs. Page

In the EmployeeRepository , we saw one of the methods returns  Slice and the other return  Page . Both of them are Spring Data JPA , where  Page is a sub-interface of  Slice . Both of them are used to hold and return a subset of data. Let’s have a look at them one by one

Slice

The Slice knows if it has content and if it is the first or last slice. It is also capable of returning the  Pageable used in the current and previous slices. Let's have a look at some important methods of  Slice .

List<T> getContent(); // get content of the slice

Pageable getPageable(); // get current pageable

boolean hasContent(); 

boolean isFirst();

boolean isLast();

Pageable nextPageable(); // pageable of the next slice

Pageable previousPageable(); // pageable of the previous slice

Page

Page is a sub-interface of  Slice and has a couple of additional methods. It knows the number of total pages in the table as well as the total number of records. Below are some important methods from Page .

static <T> Page<T> empty; //create an empty page

long getTotalElements(); // number of total elements in the table

int totalPages() // number of total pages in the table

Summary

In this pagination and sorting example with Spring Data JPA , we learned why pagination is required. We also learned how to get paginated as well as sorted subsets of data. Lastly, we have also seen the  Slice and  Page interfaces and their differences.

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