CakePHP: Storing paging info in the Session

Warning: This post applies to CakePHP 1.3. If you are using CakePHP 2, then visit the updated version available through here.

There is no way you can miss it. Sooner or later you 'll end up having baked your controllers and views only to discover that when you edit a record from the 4^th page and press submit on the edit page, much to your annoyance you end up on page one. Needless to say that whatever sort order was there is now gone with the wind.

I have googled a bit and found out the following article in Stack Overflow. The solutions provided over there seemed rather complicated to me, so I decided to craft my own.

Now here is the deal: From what I have seen in cake 1.3, paging is controlled by the value of three parameters: page, sort and direction. All we need to do is provide a way to store them in the session and then have the controller's redirect method inject these back into the URL parameters when they are not present.

<?php
     
class AppController extends Controller {
    const SESSION_KEY = 'PagingInfo.%s.%s';
        
    public $components = array('Session');            

    protected function savePagingInfo()
    {
        // create an array to hold the paging info
        $argsToSave = array();

        // remove paging info from passed args
        foreach( $this->passedArgs as $key => $value)
            if ($key == 'page' || $key == 'sort' || $key == 'direction')
                $argsToSave[$key] = $value;

        // abort if any paging info was found
        $sessionKey = $this->buildSessionKey();
        if (!empty($argsToSave)) {
            $this->Session->write( $sessionKey, $argsToSave);
            return;
        }
        
        // no paging info let's see if we have something in the sesion
        if ($this->Session->check($sessionKey)) {
                $pagingInfo = $this->Session->read($sessionKey);
                $this->passedArgs = array_merge( $this->passedArgs, $pagingInfo);
        }
    }
                        
    private function buildSessionKey($action = NULL)
    {
        if (empty($action))
            $action = $this->action;
            
        return sprintf( self::SESSION_KEY, $this->name, $action);
    }
}
     
?>    

This approach may be simplistic but in my case it worked. All I had to was call $this->savePagingInfo(); from my index() action and then let the rest of the baked code do its work.

Note

And one last comment, there are many cases that you need paging during display of master detail record sets. In cases like these savePagingInfo() will save paging status for the detail records matching the current master and when the master changes, the paging in the session becomes invalid. My simple solution to this is to add a 'page' => 1 entry in the $url params pointing to a master record change. With the design of the application I am currently working on this proves just good enough.