Pagination

Updated Dec 30, 2022 ·

Overview

Pagination allows you to split large result sets into smaller, manageable chunks. This helps improve performance and makes it easier to navigate through large datasets.

• Use from to set the starting point
• Use size to define the number of results per page.
• Query large datasets without overwhelming the system or user.

Example

Consider an index with movie films across different genres. Let's assume there are 10 films under the Sci-Fi genre, as shown below:

Result 1: Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope
Result 2: Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back
Result 3: Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi
Result 4: Star Trek Beyond
Result 5: The Matrix
Result 6: Blade Runner 2049
Result 7: Guardians of the Galaxy
Result 8: The Terminator
Result 9: Avatar
Result 10: Inception

First, store the Elasticsearch endpoint and credentials in variables:

ELASTIC_ENDPOINT="https://your-elasticsearch-endpoint"
ELASTIC_USER="your-username"
ELASTIC_PW="your-password"

To specify pagination, use from and size parameters:

curl -s -u $ELASTIC_USER:$ELASTIC_PW \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-XGET $ELASTIC_ENDPOINT:9200/movies/_search?pretty -d '
{
  "from": 3,
  "size": 2,
  "query": {
    "match": {
      "genre": "Sci-Fi"
    }
  }
}' | jq

The from parameter specifies the cutting point (3rd result), and size defines the number of results to return (2 results). The pagination will cut after the cutting point, which will return:

Result 4: Star Trek Beyond
Result 5: The Matrix

If from is not specified, the cutting point will automatically start from 0.

Considerations

There are some important considerations when implementing pagination in Elasticsearch:

• Deep pagination impacts performance.
• Retrieving and sorting large offsets is inefficient.
• Limit the number of results returned to avoid performance degradation.