Pagination links in Rest API - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Pagination links

📖 Scenario: You are building a simple REST API that returns a list of items with pagination support. Pagination helps users see a small part of the data at a time and navigate through pages.

🎯 Goal: Create a REST API response that includes pagination links for first, previous, next, and last pages based on the current page and total pages.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary called pagination with keys for current_page and total_pages.

Create a variable called base_url with the string "https://api.example.com/items?page=".

Create a dictionary called links that contains the pagination URLs for first, previous, next, and last pages.

Print the links dictionary.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Pagination is used in APIs to limit the amount of data sent at once and to help users navigate through large lists easily.

💼 Career

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

1

DATA SETUP: Create pagination info

Create a dictionary called pagination with current_page set to 3 and total_pages set to 5.

Rest API

# Create the pagination dictionary with current_page and total_pages
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use curly braces {} to create a dictionary with the keys exactly as "current_page" and "total_pages".

2

CONFIGURATION: Define base URL

Create a variable called base_url and set it to the string "https://api.example.com/items?page=".

Rest API

pagination = {"current_page": 3, "total_pages": 5}
# Create the base_url string
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Assign the exact URL string to the variable base_url.

3

CORE LOGIC: Create pagination links

Create a dictionary called links with keys first, previous, next, and last. Use base_url plus the page number to build each URL. For previous, use pagination["current_page"] - 1. For next, use pagination["current_page"] + 1. For first, use page 1. For last, use pagination["total_pages"].

Rest API

pagination = {"current_page": 3, "total_pages": 5}
base_url = "https://api.example.com/items?page="
# Create the links dictionary with first, previous, next, and last URLs
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use string concatenation and str() to build URLs for each link.

4

OUTPUT: Print the pagination links

Write a print statement to display the links dictionary.

Rest API

pagination = {"current_page": 3, "total_pages": 5}
base_url = "https://api.example.com/items?page="
links = {
    "first": base_url + "1",
    "previous": base_url + str(pagination["current_page"] - 1),
    "next": base_url + str(pagination["current_page"] + 1),
    "last": base_url + str(pagination["total_pages"])
}
# Print the links dictionary
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(links) to show the dictionary output.