Imagine that you have a recordset containing 100 records, for example. Usually you wouldn't want to display all 100 records at once, as it's far too much information for a web site visitor to take in at once, and it can also make your web pages slow to load. Instead, it's much more desirable to be able to show the user 10 records at a time for example, and let them move back and forth between pages. A perfect example of this is a search engine such as Google, although it can be used on any web site that uses dynamic data.

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Summary

In this tutorial, we first looked at creating a page that displayed the results of a database query, and showing all results returned to the user.

We then looked at the MySQL LIMIT command, which returns only certain records from the results obtained by a query, meaning you only get the records you are actually going to use, creating faster and more efficient queries. We used the LIMIT command to adapt our existing code so that it showed the results in pages of 5 records to a page.

We then looked at creating a dynamic navigation bar, which allows the users to quickly move backwards and forwards between pages. Finally we looked at how to alter the code so that if results of a search are being shown, the search parameters are preserved as the user moves from page to page.