In this episode, we dive into making it possible to "jump" directly to a specific post inside a paginated discussion thread. Now that our reply system works, we're focusing on a common discussion feature: when you click a link to a specific post, even if it's buried on another page, you'll land exactly where you need to be.
We start by adjusting our pagination so it's easy to test whether the app puts us on the correct page. The challenge is that Laravel's default paginator doesn't natively know which page a particular post lives on, so we need to figure that out ourselves. The approach here involves adding the target post's ID to the URL, then having the server-side controller calculate which page that post belongs on. Once that's figured out, we can redirect the user to the right page, with the post ID in the query string for easy scrolling.
You'll see how to find where a post sits within all replies using Laravel collections, calculate the correct page number, and then round up so everything works if the post is near the end. To make this future-proof, we also set a constant for "posts per page" so our calculation stays solid even if the per-page count changes.
Lastly, we improve the discussions list so clicking on the "last post" takes users directly to the right page and post, not just page one. Now anywhere in the app, you can easily generate a link to any specific post in any discussion! In the next episode, we’ll get fancy and actually scroll users to the post once the page loads.