How to insert a page break manually in Rails?

Question

In my project, an Article has many Items within it. Since each Item has different length, so I would like to implement pagination manually, for example, by creating a PageBreakItem model, in order to allow users insert page breaks wherever they want. But I don't know how to use "page" parameter in controller to render views correctly.

Some gems like kaminari or will_paginate only allow me to configure the number of items per page. They don't have options for inserting page breaks manually.

Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

You don't need a special model for this. You could do this with small adaptation of your Item model: Add sort_order numeric field to denote order of items within the article and is_on_new_page boolean field to denote a page break occurring before that article.