In this episode, we're diving into setting up pagination for our comments. We talk about why it's smart to get pagination sorted early—basically, it's a pain to retrofit it later after you've already added more features like editing and deleting comments.
We start by switching our comments retrieval to use the paginate
method. For demo purposes, we set the pagination to show 1 comment per page so we can clearly see it working. Of course, when we test it in the browser, we get an error! So, we walk through a bit of debugging—checking what kind of object our template receives and realizing we need to tweak how we're passing the comments to the view.
Next, we tidy things up in our Blade template, assigning the paginated results to a variable so everything is more readable. We do a quick check on database queries to make sure we’re not accidentally loading the same stuff twice.
Then, it’s time to add the actual pagination links using Laravel’s built-in pagination method. We put the links in the template with a bit of margin for spacing. Testing it in the browser, we click through the pages to make sure everything works as expected.
Finally, we make a few adjustments—like showing the total number of comments and tweaking the number of comments per page. By the end, pagination is working perfectly and we’re ready to add more features, knowing pagination won’t trip us up later!