How to implement Pagination in Spring-boot project?

November 15, 2025

This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Sanju Shaw

Before beginning, let’s understand what pagination actually is.

Pagination simply means breaking a huge dataset into smaller chunks or pages. This is exactly what you see on e-commerce websites when products load page by page, or when you scroll through Google search results — you never get all the data at once.

It’s useful because:

You save bandwidth.
Backend responds faster
UI becomes smoother.
Database queries remain optimized

How to set-up pagination

Suppose we have an API like:

/api/books?query=adventure

Now we can easily configure the backend to limit the number of items returned.
Spring Data JPA already gives built-in support for pagination using Pageable.

We can also let the client decide how many results they want:

/api/books?query=adventure&page=0&size=20

page -> which page number(0-based index)
size -> how many items per page

Let’s implement this properly.

Coding time

We are using Spring Boot + MySQL + Spring Data JPA.

1. Controller Layer

@RestController
@RequestMapping("/api/books")
public class BookController {

    @Autowired
    private BookService bookService;

    @GetMapping
    public Page<Book> getBooks(
            @RequestParam(defaultValue = "adventure") String query,
            @RequestParam(defaultValue = "0") int page,
            @RequestParam(defaultValue = "10") int size) {

        return bookService.getBooks(query, page, size);
    }
}

we use Spring’s Page class
page & size have default values.
Output automatically includes : totalElements, totalPages, current page number, size, and you actual data list.

2. Service Layer(Business Logic):

@Service
public class BookService {

    @Autowired
    private BookRepository bookRepository;

    public Page<Book> getBooks(String query, int page, int size) {
        Pageable pageable = PageRequest.of(page, size);
        return bookRepository.findByTitleContainingIgnoreCase(query, pageable);
    }
}

Here:

`PageRequest.of(page, size) creates the pagination configuration.
Repository method automatically handles pagination.

3. Repository Layer:

This is the beauty of Spring Data JPA – no SQL written manually.
It handles :

LIMIT
OFFSET
Filtering
Sorting All under the hood.

want to sort the results??

bash /api/books?page=0&size=10&sort=price,desc

Change your controller parameter:

Final Result

If you call:

bash GET /api/books?query=adventure&page=0&size=5

Response be like:

This is how pagination works smoothly in Spring Boot.

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This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Sanju Shaw