Pagination is a very common task in web application development. But sometimes we need to paginate something with ajax request. The interest to use Ajax for this is to provide a dynamic interface which doesn’t need to reload the entire page when next results(page) displayed. Ajax is really nicely integrated with Rails, and using it is very easier with this great framework. To work with ajax requests your browser must be enabled to handled java script requests. I knew two methods for that problem.

First Method

Your Controller code

  def ajax_pagination_links

    @posts_pages, @posts= paginate :posts, :per_page => 3, :order=> “id DESC”

    respond_to do |format|

      format.html {render :partial=>”posts”,:layout=>”application”}

      format.js {render :update do |page|

        page.replace_html ‘total_posts’, :partial=>’total_posts’

        page.visual_effect :highlight, “total_posts”

      end}

    end

  end  

Layout

   <%= javascript_include_tag :defaults %>

View

    <%= render :partial=>'total_posts' %> 

_total_posts.rhtml

  <% for post in @posts %>  

    <%= truncate(h(post.title.capitalize!),50) -%>

    <%= truncate(h(post.description.capitalize!),50) -%>    

  <%end -%>   

  <%= link_to_remote 'Previous page',{:url=>{:action=>ajax_pagination_links, :page => @posts_pages.current.previous },  if @posts_pages.current.previous -%>

   <%= link_to_remote 'Next page', {:url=>{:action=>ajax_pagination_links, :page => @posts_pages.current.next} if @posts_pages.current.next -%>

Second Method

Put this code in a helper somewhere

def ajax_pagination_links(paginator, options={})

options.merge!(ActionView::Helpers::PaginationHelper::DEFAULT_OPTIONS) {|key, old, new| old}

    window_pages = paginator.current.window(options[:window_size]).pages

    return if window_pages.length <= 1 unless 

    options[:link_to_current_page]

    first, last = paginator.first, paginator.last

    returning html = '' do

    if options[:always_show_anchors] and not window_pages[0].first?  

      html << link_to_remote(first.number, :update => options[:update], :url => { options[:name] => first }.update(options[:params] ))

      html << ' ... ' if window_pages[0].number - first.number > 1

      html << ' '

    end

    window_pages.each do |page|

      if paginator.current == page && !options[:link_to_current_page]   

        html << page.number.to_s   

      else

        html << link_to_remote(page.number, :update => options[:update], :url => { options[:name] => page }.update(options[:params] ))

      end

      html << ' '

      end

      if options[:always_show_anchors] && !window_pages.last.last?   

        html << ' ... ' if last.number - window_pages[-1].number > 1

        html << link_to_remote(paginator.last.number, :update => options[:update], :url => { options[:name] => last }.update( options[:params]))

      end

    end   

  end   

and use following code for creating links

View

<%= ajax_pagination_links @posts_pages, {:params => {:posts => @posts} } %>