Pagination With Room Database and Jetpack Compose — Part 1

Exploring Paging 3 with Coroutines

Photo by Carl Heyerdahl on Unsplash

Introduction

Let’s start with the obvious question, What is paging? Paging is nothing but extracting the data in manageable chunks from a huge data source. In a mobile ecosystem, usually, this is used when we want to show a list of items.

Let’s take Instagram as an example, When you open the application, you’ll see endless feeds of posts, reels, etc. In a nutshell, the developers first fetch a certain number of items and display them in the UI. As the user scrolls through the feed and reaches a certain threshold, loading the next items will be triggered. This will continue in a loop to keep the user engaged in the application effectively.

This approach has two main advantages:

1. Less loading time: As the number of items to be fetched depends on the screen size, APIs will be optimized beforehand for better response time.
2. Buttery smooth user experience: In most cases, users don’t even notice the loading if the threshold loading is managed effectively.

This is a two-part series exploring how to implement pagination with the following tech stack:

1. Data Source: We’ll rely on a Local database, here we use Room…