Duplicate form navigation elements, HTML ID's - html

Question

I have a table displaying results from a database, and I am adding some paging/navigation buttons to it, such as 'prev', 'next', etc. These are being constructed for now as submit input buttons that are wrapped with a form tag and some hidden inputs to pass the needed querystring values back to the page itself, which means each form and element in the form should have an ID attribute.
Now, I'd love to add the navigation to both the top and bottom of the table, so I've modularized the navigation generation into a single routine I call whenever needed. This of course leads to duplicate form and element IDs in the page when there is more than one navigation bar included.
I've thought of passing some 'count' parameter to the routine so that when generating the HTML it could append that value to the IDs, and there are other solutions, such as using a global counter (ugly), etc, but I thought I'd poll the crowd and see what others have done in this situation.
Thanks,
Paul

Answer 1

Of the solutions you have thought of thus far, I would suggest the tactic that you mention first in the last paragraph. Passing a query string variable and loading X number of records including the number passed (doing error checking of course to make sure that some sneaky user doesn't try to put random characters in the query string) would resolve your issue.
Another option (since you are obviously doing codebehind for loading from the DB) is to create a session variable and assign the value to that when the links are clicked and use it to generate the list.
For both instances, when the page loads you can take the current value being passed and add X (number of rows in results shown +1) and change the value passed by the links.

Answer 2

I recently made a paginator myself, but approached it in a totally different way. I used php to generate the numbers, and each number (page) had a tag with an href that was mywebsite.php?page=x. That way you can use a get method, grab the page number from the url, and loop through as many times as you want for the number of pages displayed.
As they say, there is more than one way to skin a cat. I prefer the url passing method because I can stay away from forms and ID's in their entirety, making it so that the paginator can go wherever I decide to slap it in (and however many times).
Here's a snapshot of how I went about generating it. Hope it gives you some ideas!
/*PAGE NUMBERS*/
// ceil rounds a decimal up to the next integer
$pages=ceil(($totalrows-1)/$tablesize); //we subtract 1 from total rows because it counts 0
//(int) typecasts the $pages variable, so that it is divisible by an integer (ceil makes it a float)
$pages=(int)$pages;
//displays all the pages with their links
//if page count is less than 7 (the full paginator), display all pages
if($pages<=7){
for($i=1;$i<=$pages;$i++){
print "<a class='pages";
//add class current_page if necessary
if($page==$i){print " current_page";}
print "' href='index.php?page=";
print $i. "'>"." $i</a> "." "." ";
}
//if page count is more than 7
}else{
//if page # is less than 4, display pages up to 7, so that there are always 7 pages available (makes the buttons not jump around)
if($page<=4){
for($i=1;$i<=7;$i++){
print "<a class='pages";
//add class current_page if necessary
if($page==$i){print " current_page";}
print "' href='index.php?page=";
print $i. "'>"." $i</a> "." "." ";
}
//if page # is less than 4 away from the end, display pages $pages-7
}elseif($page>=$pages-3){
for($i=$pages-6;$i<=$pages;$i++){
//8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15
print "<a class='pages";
//add class current_page if necessary
if($page==$i){print " current_page";}
print "' href='index.php?page=";
print $i. "'>"." $i</a> "." "." ";
}
//if it's in between the ends, do this
}else{
for($i=1;$i<$pages+1;$i++){
//limit the number of visible pages to 7
if(($i>=$page-3)&&($i<=$page+3)){
print "<a class='pages";
//add class current_page if necessary
if($page==$i){print " current_page";}
print "' href='index.php?page=";
print $i. "'>"." $i</a> "." "." ";
}
}
}
}

Answer 3

There might have been some confusion it seems over what I was looking for, but in a nutshell, a simple way to avoid the duplicate ID issue when using a form-based paging solution that can be displayed multiple times on the same page (above and below tabular data, for example). My solution is to model it after the PHPMyAdmin paging, in that I simply remove the IDs for the form elements for now and reference the data being passed via the name attribute, which allows for duplicates.