Building Generic Pagination and Order in NestJS

This article provides generic pagination and order solution in Nestjs, to be reused with any TypeORM Model. This solution is influenced by the Django framework.

First of all will create a Generic Controller, call it EndPointSet with a list function without pagination:

Then before implementing the pagination, we should create our Query parameters, which are page, pageSize, orderBy, and sortOrder. and the validation of these parameters is made using class-validation and converting the params string values to numbers using class-transformer library:

Then those params can be added to the list function as an argument:

@Get()
public async list(@Query() filter: ListFilter) {...}

In order to activate the validation library, this line has to be added in main.ts to the app object:

app.useGlobalPipes(new ValidationPipe({ transform: true }));

Then we can implement the list function as follows:

Then the Generic Controller can be used with other controller as shown here with Controller for an article entity:

Now we finished 🎉, we can now use the params in the URLs as follows for example to get a paginated response with two items on each page, and the items are ordered according to any field in this case timestamp field descendingly:

localhost:8000/article?orderBy=timestamp&page=1&pageSize=2

This article is part of articles I’m writing about building a generic Controller, you can check the first one here and follow for more 🐈:

Building Extendable Generic Nestjs Controller