Will Paginate And Ajax

December 16, 2008

I recently had to implement some ajax pagination for a site. After googling for a while I found a solution, but I couldn't customize the pagination url's or I had to specify the paginator to use (will paginate's default or mine for ajax), so I came up with this solution which fulfils all my needs. First create the following class in your app/helpers.

class RemoteLinkRenderer < WillPaginate::LinkRenderer
  def prepare(collection, options, template)
    @remote = options.delete(:remote)
    super
  end

  protected
  def page_link(page, text, attributes = {})
    if @remote
      @template.link_to_remote(text, {:url => url_for(page), :method => :get}.
                               merge(@remote), attributes)
    else
      @template.link_to(text, url_for(page), attributes)
    end
  end
end

Then you have to tell will_paginate which link_renderer to use, I do this in a rails initializer.

WillPaginate::ViewHelpers.pagination_options[:renderer] = 'RemoteLinkRenderer'

So with this solution, you can work like you would normally with will_paginate, but if you need to do an ajax link, then you'll have to pass the options in the remote hash, something like this:

will_paginate(@comments, :remote => {:update => 'comments'})

That's it enjoy. You can keep passing the same options you would normally do to will_paginate to customize the behaviour.