Filtering and Pagination with Django

If you want to build a list page that allows filtering and pagination, you have to get a few separate things to work together. Django provides some tools for pagination, but the documentation doesn't tell us how to make that work with anything else. Similarly, django_filter makes it relatively easy to add filters to a view, but doesn't tell you how to add pagination (or other things) without breaking the filtering.

The heart of the problem is that both features use query parameters, and we need to find a way to let each feature control its own query parameters without breaking the other one.

Filters

Let's start with a review of filtering, with an example of how you might subclass ListView to add filtering. To make it filter the way you want, you need to create a subclass of FilterSet and set filterset_class to that class. (See that link for how to write a filterset.)

class FilteredListView(ListView):
    filterset_class = None

    def get_queryset(self):
        # Get the queryset however you usually would.  For example:
        queryset = super().get_queryset()
        # Then use the query parameters and the queryset to
        # instantiate a filterset and save it as an attribute
        # on the view instance for later.
        self.filterset = self.filterset_class(self.request.GET, queryset=queryset)
        # Return the filtered queryset
        return self.filterset.qs.distinct()

    def get_context_data(self, **kwargs):
        context = super().get_context_data(**kwargs)
        # Pass the filterset to the template - it provides the form.
        context['filterset'] = self.filterset
        return context

Here's an example of how you might create a concrete view to use it:

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