Spring Boot Tutorial 0/110 lessons ~6 min read Lesson 33“Production-grade backends”

Pagination & Sorting

Returning unbounded result sets is how junior backends become production incidents.

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Focus

3 guided sections

Practice signal

Examples included

Career prep

Foundation builder

Introduction

Returning unbounded result sets is how junior backends become production incidents. Spring Data's Pageable makes paging and sorting trivial.

Informative example

// Repository
Page<Order> findByStatus(OrderStatus status, Pageable pageable);

// Controller
@GetMapping
public Page<OrderDto> list(
    @RequestParam(defaultValue = "PENDING") OrderStatus status,
    @PageableDefault(size = 20, sort = "createdAt", direction = Sort.Direction.DESC) Pageable page
) {
  return repo.findByStatus(status, page).map(this::toDto);
}

# request
GET /api/orders?status=PAID&page=2&size=50&sort=totalCents,desc

Best practices

Cap max size with a custom argument resolver: hard limit 100.
Prefer keyset (cursor) pagination for large datasets — offset gets slow at high pages.
Always sort by a unique field; ties + paging = duplicate rows across pages.

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