I’m building an index of contacts, displayed with paginated links provided by will_paginate.

The wiki for this plugin advises you on how to do setup your controller method, and what to put in the view to obtain a simple set of links, such as:

# /app/controllers/contact_controller.rb
def index
  @contacts = Contact.paginate :page => params[:page], :per_page => 10, :order => 'created_at DESC'
end

<!-- /app/views/contact/index.html.erb -->
<%= will_paginate @contacts %>

What I’m not finding however are more advanced methods of using the will_paginate plugin. Here are a few things I’ve found.

Links at top and bottom of paginated section

You can add the paginated links to the top and bottom of your paginated section using this syntax:

<% paginated_section @contacts do %>
  <table id="contacts">
    <%= render(:partial => "contact_row", :collection => @contacts) %>
  </table>
<% end %>

Display Page Entries Info

You can display text on your page such as ‘Displaying contacts 11 - 12 of 12 in total’ by using the following view helper.

<%= page_entries_info @contacts %>

Current and Total Page Number

If you want to display the total number of pages in your own way, you can do this by using the ‘total_pages’ method of the paginated collection.

You are viewing page <%= @contacts.current_page %>
of <%= @contacts.total_pages %>