[Admin] Offer Keyset / Seek Pagination

[VaZark]

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow Django's Code of Conduct

Feature Description

Offer a KeysetPagination with just the next and previous buttons, and fetch the items count on ajax button click (or just hide it) for the admin list view

This also helps ensure that links shared to look up a table are far more precise, as data can change between pages on a fast-moving dataset. There are some tables that I look up via a DB tool like DBeaver due to incessant http timeouts.

Problem

When working with large datasets, the admin's standard LIMIT..OFFSET pagination becomes expensive, real fast. Simple page loads can take seconds if not minutes. Add in the default count on every list page, the two queries might be too much to handle.

Request or proposal

proposal

Additional Details

No response

Implementation Suggestions

Django already offers a custom pagination class. This would essentially be leveraging the same but as an officially supported lookup method.

[github-actions]

Thank you VaZark for sharing your idea! We have a lot of them so please be patient. You can see the current queue here.

Community instructions

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Reaction Guide

• 👍 This is something I would use
• 👎 This is something that would cause problems for me or Django
• 😕 I’m indifferent to this
• 🎉 This is an easy win

[LilyAcorn]

I've definitely run into the count issue before. I think having a more performant alternative readily available would be a win.

[collinanderson]

This doesn't solve the problem but worth mentioning explicitly here the show_full_result_count option for turning off these slow counts.

[realsuayip]

Such type of Pagination requires a sort key that is unique (id) or near unique (a timestamp) to be consistent across pages.

Django admin conveniently allows sorting on declared list_display fields, it's a problem.

So if this feature ever gets implemented, we need a decent doc explaining how it works (as in https://www.django-rest-framework.org/api-guide/pagination/#cursorpagination)

[mlissner]

We use https://github.com/a1tus/django-admin-cursor-paginator for this and it makes a huge difference. I'd love to see this integrated into Django, as well as an overall effort to make it friendlier to big databases.