Offset-based pagination in Rest API - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Offset-based pagination

📖 Scenario: You are building a simple REST API that returns a list of books. Since the list can be very long, you want to allow users to get the books in smaller chunks, called pages. This is called pagination.One common way to paginate is using offset-based pagination. This means the user tells the API how many books to skip (offset) and how many books to get (limit).

🎯 Goal: Build a REST API endpoint that returns a paginated list of books using offset and limit parameters.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a list of 10 books with exact titles.

Add variables for offset and limit to control pagination.

Use offset and limit to select the correct slice of books.

Print the paginated list of books.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

APIs often return large lists of data like products, users, or posts. Pagination helps users see data in smaller, easier parts.

💼 Career

Understanding pagination is important for backend developers and API designers to build efficient and user-friendly services.

1

Create the list of books

Create a list called books with these exact titles as strings: 'Book 1', 'Book 2', 'Book 3', 'Book 4', 'Book 5', 'Book 6', 'Book 7', 'Book 8', 'Book 9', 'Book 10'.

Rest API

# Create the list of books
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use square brackets [] to create a list and put each book title in quotes separated by commas.

2

Add offset and limit variables

Add two variables: offset set to 3 and limit set to 4.

Rest API

books = ['Book 1', 'Book 2', 'Book 3', 'Book 4', 'Book 5', 'Book 6', 'Book 7', 'Book 8', 'Book 9', 'Book 10']
# Add offset and limit variables
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just write offset = 3 and limit = 4 on separate lines.

3

Select the paginated books

Create a new list called paginated_books that contains the slice of books starting from offset and including limit items.

Rest API

books = ['Book 1', 'Book 2', 'Book 3', 'Book 4', 'Book 5', 'Book 6', 'Book 7', 'Book 8', 'Book 9', 'Book 10']
offset = 3
limit = 4
# Create paginated_books using offset and limit
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use list slicing: books[offset:offset + limit] to get the right part of the list.

4

Print the paginated books

Print the paginated_books list.

Rest API

books = ['Book 1', 'Book 2', 'Book 3', 'Book 4', 'Book 5', 'Book 6', 'Book 7', 'Book 8', 'Book 9', 'Book 10']
offset = 3
limit = 4
paginated_books = books[offset:offset + limit]
# Print the paginated_books list
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(paginated_books) to show the selected books.