On July 24th I attended the Barcamp at the OkC Coco. I met several people from ninecollective (great logo). We merged their idea of a C# dojo and mine of a TDD clinic and decided to do a Dojo. Ryan Rauk (twitter: @rahur) recommended we create a simple paginator for scrolling through a large list of items.
Here’s an example: Imagine you have 1000 items to list, 10 items per page. If you are on the 20th page, you should see links like the following for next and previous:
< 18 19 20 21 22 >
So the inputs are the total number of items, number of items per page and the current page number. That’s what we started with. It turns out there’s a lot to this problem, but this should be enough to get you started. I’ll be working on this a bit, because several interesting ideas arrise:
- What are the inputs/outputs
- What is the responsibility of the paginator, does it return just numbers or links?
- Does the paginator maintain state, or does the client maintain it?
- What should the output look like? We started with an array of strings, but I prefer to wrap collections by default, so how does this pan out?
- We violated one check (assertion) per test. While we did not change our interface, we would have been in better shape to refactor the interface.
In any case, it’s a simple but rich problem.
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