title: Pagination
---
summary: Shows how to build a pagination with Lektor.
---
body:

When you have too many items to show on one page you might want to use
Lektor's built-in pagination support.  It allows a page to show only a
subset of the child records per page.

## Configuring Pagination

First you need to enable the pagination in the model.  Primarily you need
to enable the pagination and set how many items show up on a page.  Just
add this to the parent model:

```ini
[pagination]
enabled = yes
per_page = 10
```

## Selecting the Children

Now that you have the pagination configured you need to iterate only over
the children of an active page in your template rather than the children of the
entire record.  This can be done by changing `this.children` to
`this.pagination.items`:

```html+jinja
{% for child in this.pagination.items %}
  ...
{% endfor %}
```

## Rendering a Pagination

Lastly we need to render the pagination somehow.  This is up to you.  The
handy [pagination object :ref](../../api/db/record/pagination/) has a few
very useful attributes that can be used for rendering.  It's recommended
to make a `macros/pagination.html` that looks something like this so that
you can render the same pagination everywhere:

```html+jinja
{% macro render_pagination(pagination) %}
  <div class="pagination">
    {% if pagination.has_prev %}
      <a href="{{ pagination.prev|url }}">&laquo; Previous</a>
    {% else %}
      <span class="disabled">&laquo; Previous</span>
    {% endif %}
    | <strong>{{ pagination.page }}</strong> |
    {% if pagination.has_next %}
      <a href="{{ pagination.next|url }}">Next &raquo;</a>
    {% else %}
      <span class="disabled">Next &raquo;</span>
    {% endif %}
  </div>
{% endmacro %}
```

## Using the Macro

Now that you have that set up, you can use the macro like this:

```html+jinja
{% from "macros/pagination.html" import render_pagination %}
{% if this.pagination.pages > 1 %}
  {{ render_pagination(this.pagination) }}
{% endif %}
```