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Pagination with Relative Cursors
This feature thread tracks the development and implementation of relative cursor pagination across Shopify's APIs. Initially, the platform relied on offset-based pagination, which led to significant performance degradation for large datasets. This post details the introduction of relative cursor pagination as a solution, enabling faster and more scalable data retrieval by remembering the last record's ID or sortable field value. The initiative involves standardizing pagination patterns, providing faster and more scalable data retrieval. This post also explores strategies for optimizing GraphQL queries on the client-side, including techniques for handling large and slow queries, preparing for paginated lists, rolling out new features, and making queries faster. It details strategies like designing base queries, loading multiple product pages, controlling new field rollouts using `@include` and `@skip` tags, chaining queries, and using parallel queries to improve performance and scalability.
