Pagination and Sorting in Spring Boot REST APIs

When your API deals with large datasets — like fetching thousands of users or records — loading everything at once is inefficient. That’s where pagination and sorting come in. They help limit the data sent to the client while giving control over how data is retrieved and displayed.

In this post, you’ll learn how to:

• Add pagination and sorting in Spring Boot to a REST API
• Use Spring Data’s Pageable and Sort
• Customize response structure for frontend consumption

⚙️ Basic Setup

We’ll build a simple API to demonstrate paginated and sorted retrieval of User entities.

✅ Dependencies

Ensure you have Spring Data JPA and Web in your pom.xml:

  org.springframework.boot
  spring-boot-starter-web



  org.springframework.boot
  spring-boot-starter-data-jpa



  com.h2database
  h2
  runtime

📦 Entity & Repository

✅ User Entity

@Entity
public class User {
    
    @Id
    @GeneratedValue(strategy = GenerationType.IDENTITY)
    private Long id;

    private String name;
    private String email;
    private int age;

    // Getters and setters
}

✅ User Repository

public interface UserRepository extends JpaRepository {
}

🔄 Implement Pagination & Sorting

Spring Data JPA automatically supports Pageable and Sort.

✅ Service Layer

@Service
public class UserService {
    private final UserRepository userRepository;
    public UserService(UserRepository userRepository) {
        this.userRepository = userRepository;
    }
    public Page getUsers(Pageable pageable) {
        return userRepository.findAll(pageable);
    }
}

🚀 REST Controller

@RestController
@RequestMapping("/api/users")
public class UserController {
    private final UserService userService;
    public UserController(UserService userService) {
        this.userService = userService;
    }
    @GetMapping
    public ResponseEntity> getUsers(
            @RequestParam(defaultValue = "0") int page,
            @RequestParam(defaultValue = "5") int size,
            @RequestParam(defaultValue = "id,asc") String[] sort
    ) {
        // Extract sort parameters
        Sort.Direction direction = sort[1].equalsIgnoreCase("desc") ? Sort.Direction.DESC : Sort.Direction.ASC;
        Pageable pageable = PageRequest.of(page, size, Sort.by(direction, sort[0]));
        return ResponseEntity.ok(userService.getUsers(pageable));
    }
}

🔍 Test via Postman or Browser

Try the following URL:

GET http://localhost:8080/api/users?page=0&size=5&sort=name,asc

This retrieves the first page, with 5 users, sorted by name in ascending order.

🧾 Custom Page Response DTO (Optional)

Instead of returning Page directly, wrap it for better frontend readability:

public class UserPageResponse {
    private List content;
    private int pageNumber;
    private int pageSize;
    private long totalElements;
    private int totalPages;
    private boolean last;
}

UserPageResponse response = new UserPageResponse();
Page pageUsers = userService.getUsers(pageable);
response.setContent(pageUsers.getContent());
response.setPageNumber(pageUsers.getNumber());
response.setPageSize(pageUsers.getSize());
response.setTotalElements(pageUsers.getTotalElements());
response.setTotalPages(pageUsers.getTotalPages());
response.setLast(pageUsers.isLast());
return ResponseEntity.ok(response);

Pageable pageable = PageRequest.of(page, size, Sort.by(
        Arrays.stream(sort)
              .map(order -> new Sort.Order(
                    order.split(",")[1].equalsIgnoreCase("desc") ? Sort.Direction.DESC : Sort.Direction.ASC,
                    order.split(",")[0]
              ))
              .collect(Collectors.toList())
));