Django pagination while objects are being added - django

Question

I've got a website that shows photos that are always being added and people are seeing duplicates between pages on the home page (last added photos)
I'm not entirely sure how to approach this problem but this is basically whats happening:
Home page displays latest 20 photos [0:20]
User scrolls (meanwhile photos are being added to the db
User loads next page (through ajax)
Page displays photos [20:40]
User sees duplicate photos because the photos added to the top of the list pushed them down into the next page
What is the best way to solve this problem? I think I need to somehow cache the queryset on the users session maybe? I don't know much about caches really so a step-by-step explanation would be invaluable
here is the function that gets a new page of images:
def get_images_paginated(query, origins, page_num):
args = None
queryset = Image.objects.all().exclude(hidden=True).exclude(tags__isnull=True)
per_page = 20
page_num = int(page_num)
if origins:
origins = [Q(origin=origin) for origin in origins]
args = reduce(operator.or_, origins)
queryset = queryset.filter(args)
if query:
images = watson.filter(queryset, query)
else:
images = watson.filter(queryset, query).order_by('-id')
amount = images.count()
images = images.prefetch_related('tags')[(per_page*page_num)-per_page:per_page*page_num]
return images, amount
the view that uses the function:
def get_images_ajax(request):
if not request.is_ajax():
return render(request, 'home.html')
query = request.POST.get('query')
origins = request.POST.getlist('origin')
page_num = request.POST.get('page')
images, amount = get_images_paginated(query, origins, page_num)
pages = int(math.ceil(amount / 20))
if int(page_num) >= pages:
last_page = True;
else:
last_page = False;
context = {
'images':images,
'last_page':last_page,
}
return render(request, '_images.html', context)

Answer 1

One approach you could take is to send the oldest ID that the client currently has (i.e., the ID of the last item in the list currently) in the AJAX request, and then make sure you only query older IDs.
So get_images_paginated is modified as follows:
def get_images_paginated(query, origins, page_num, last_id=None):
args = None
queryset = Image.objects.all().exclude(hidden=True).exclude(tags__isnull=True)
if last_id is not None:
queryset = queryset.filter(id__lt=last_id)
...
You would need to send the last ID in your AJAX request, and pass this from your view function to get_images_paginated:
def get_images_ajax(request):
if not request.is_ajax():
return render(request, 'home.html')
query = request.POST.get('query')
origins = request.POST.getlist('origin')
page_num = request.POST.get('page')
# Get last ID. Note you probably need to do some type casting here.
last_id = request.POST.get('last_id', None)
images, amount = get_images_paginated(query, origins, page_num, last_id)
...
As #doniyor says you should use Django's built in pagination in conjunction with this logic.