Rails Pagination by Letters (not Numbers like will_paginate)

I want my list of data to be paginated by letters. The will_paginate plugin certainly gives excellent pagination if all you want is “prev 1 2 3 .. 6 next” kind of pagination.

However what if you’re looking for entries that start with the letter H and you have no idea if that’s page 4 or page 42? You’re probably wanting something more like “# A B C D…” pagination.

I did some googling and found people speaking of solutions for “A B C D…” but in my case, not all of my entries start with letters! If you have something like media titles in your data set, having an entry start with a number is perfectly normal. Some might even start with special characters! Some people suggest having an ‘All’ option, but if you need pagination, it’s probably because you have enough data that showing all options at once is a very bad idea.

Here’s my solution:

First I make a helper function for my options that’ll be cached permanently.

def letter_options
  $letter_options_list ||= ['#'].concat(("A".."Z").to_a)
end

Here’s my index action in my controller:

@letter = params[:letter].blank? ? 'a' : params[:letter]
if params[:letter] == '#'
  @data = Model.find(:all, :conditions => ["title REGEXP ?",
      "^[^a-z]"], :order => 'title', :select => "id, title")
else
  @data = Model.find(:all, :conditions => ["title LIKE ?",
      "#{params[:letter]}%"], :order => 'title', :select => "id, title")
end

Here’s my html

<div class ="pagination">
  <% letter_options.each do |letter| %>
    <% if params[:letter] == letter %>
      <span class="current"><%= letter %></span>
    <% else %>
      <%= link_to letter, staff_games_path(:letter => letter)%>
    <% end %>
  <% end %>
</div>

There we go! Now the # will pull up all entries where the first character is not a letter.