More efficient way of paginating in Django

Question

I am trying to implement pagination in a django project.

I looked at default django paginator and found this example:

def listing(request):
    contact_list = Contacts.objects.all()
    paginator = Paginator(contact_list, 25) # Show 25 contacts per page

    page = request.GET.get('page')
    try:
        contacts = paginator.page(page)
    except PageNotAnInteger:
        # If page is not an integer, deliver first page.
        contacts = paginator.page(1)
    except EmptyPage:
        # If page is out of range (e.g. 9999), deliver last page of    results.
        contacts = paginator.page(paginator.num_pages)

    return render_to_response('list.html', {"contacts": contacts})

It looks like it gets ALL the objects from the database and return the needed ones to the template.

That is not very efficient right?

I also looked at django-endless-pagination which seemed really difficult to customize.

I am looking for easily customizable solution as I will integrate it with haystack and elasticsearch

What else can I use?

Answer 1

Paginator won't get all the objects. As in your case, you asked for 25 objects. Thus, each page will contain 25 objects. When you try to access the next page, a new DB request will be sent to access objects 26-50.