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ruby-on-railswill-paginate

how am I supposed to use will-paginate with different sized columns?

I want to achieve the following in a rails web app:

Layout description

In my image, 1 = @article.first, 2 = @article.offset(1).first

So for example: 

ArticlesController

def index 
  @articles = Article.all.paginate(page: params[:page], per_page: 16)
end

Now how am I supposed to achieve this layout in the view?

Solution

  • The use (or not) of will_paginate (or any pagination, for that matter) is irrelevant to how you lay your visual elements out - that's the entire point of the MVC architecture.

    The call to paginate makes sure you get one page of 16 results at a time, with the page number controlled by the ?page= parameter in your case.

    Elements are often laid out one after the other, which results in a formation using .each:

    @articles.each do |article|
  render 'articles/article', :article => article
end

    In your case, you may need to access the articles in the collection one by one, or even by index. ActiveRecord::Relation collections support array-like access, so to get the first of the sixteen elements you can use articles[0], the second at articles[1], all the way to the sixteenth at articles[15].