How to Implement Pagination in Rust APIs

Implement pagination by defining a serde::Deserialize struct for query parameters and using the Query extractor in your Axum handler.

use axum::{extract::Query, routing::get, Router};
use serde::Deserialize;

#[derive(Deserialize)]
struct Pagination {
    page: usize,
    per_page: usize,
}

async fn list_items(pagination: Query<Pagination>) {
    let page = pagination.0.page;
    let per_page = pagination.0.per_page;
    // Fetch and return paginated data here
}

let app = Router::new().route("/items", get(list_items));

Pagination lets you split a large list of items into smaller chunks so users don't have to load everything at once. You define a structure for the page number and size, and the framework automatically reads those numbers from the URL. It's like asking a librarian for just the first 10 books on a shelf instead of the whole library.