CakePHP: How To Code Custom Paginate Parameters In Controller’s Action

If you have just came across the paginate helper in the Cake Docs, it seems that you can only define a general var $paginate array at the top of your controller. Unless all your actions are going to paginate the same results the same way, defining a general var $paginate is not going to get you very far. Here’s how you can get more control of by defining how each of a controller’s action is going to paginate.

Let’s say you have a model called Review and you have a ReviewController with an action ReviewsForProduct() which lists all reviews for a specific product.

function ReviewsForProduct($productid) {
$this->paginate['Review'] = array(
                'limit' => 15,
                'order' => 'Rating.rating desc, Rating.created desc',
                'contain' => array(
                    'Product',
                    'Rating' => array('fields' => array('id', 'rating', 'created')),
                    ),
                'fields' => array('id', 'product_id', 'content'),
                'conditions' => array('Product.category'=>'3', 'Product.id'=>$productid)
            );
}
$reviews = $this->paginate('Review');
$this->set(compact('reviews')); ?>

And in the ReviewsForProduct.ctp view, use the $paginator to paginate your reviews results as you normally would (nothing fancy here)

<?php echo $paginator->prev();?> 
| <?php echo $paginator->numbers();?> 
<?php echo $paginator->next();?>

This way you can free up yourself from having the same pagination rules being applied to all of your controller’s action. Just remember that the trick is $this->paginate[‘ModelNameHere’], all other filters (or should I say find params) such as limit, order, fields, contain and conditions can go in under it as an array as if you were doing a find.