Use pagination with Sharepoint search API

Often search request return a lot of data. It may be insufficient to show all this data at once on the page – performance may suffer, page may be overloaded with data, etc. In order to address these issues we may use pagination i.e. get data by chunks. But how it often happens with Sharepoint there are own considerations related with pagination in search API.

If we will check documentation of SharePoint Search REST API we will find several properties which affect pagination logic:

• StartRow: The first row that is included in the search results that are returned. You use this parameter when you want to implement paging for search results.
• RowLimit: The maximum number of rows overall that are returned in the search results. Compared to RowsPerPage, RowLimit is the maximum number of rows returned overall.
• RowsPerPage: The maximum number of rows to return per page. Compared to RowLimit, RowsPerPage refers to the maximum number of rows to return per page, and is used primarily when you want to implement paging for search results.

So based on this description we may assume that most obvious way to get paginated data is to use StartRow and RowsPerPage:

var searchUrl = "http://{tenant}.sharepoint.com/_api/search/query?querytext='" + query + "'&selectproperties='Title'&startRow=" + startRow + "&rowsPerPage=" + pageSize;

It will work but with one condition: if page size is less than default page size which is 10 items per page. If page size is greater than default page size it won’t work: in this case you have to use RowLimit which will work as page size even though documentation says different:

var searchUrl = "http://{tenant}.sharepoint.com/_api/search/query?querytext='" + query + "'&selectproperties='Title'&startRow=" + startRow + "&rowLimit=" + pageSize;

This approach will allow to implement pagination with page size bigger than default search page size (10 items per page).