Codeigniter pagination using query strings

Question

I am trying to implement Codeigniter pagination using query strings but have run into a few issues with this. I've switched on

$config['page_query_string'] = TRUE;

So to use query strings for pagination but as far as I can see this is really intended to work when you are using query strings for controller and method routing. However in my case I am still using URI segments for routing but just want to use query strings for pagination, filtering results, search etc. When I try to use http_build_query() to reconstruct the url with the query string sent through it causes the per_page (which I have renamed to offset) to get written twice on any pagination link after the first page. The reason being that when I recreate the query string offset is already in the $_GET on subsequent pages and CI is also appending it as well causing it to appear twice. In the code below I've removed the original per_page query string from the $_GET so the query string can be rebuilt without it and CI will add this during the pagination create_links(). I wanted to check if this makes sense or if there is a cleaner way of dealing with this.

// load pagination library
$this->load->library('pagination');

// set pagination base url
$config['base_url'] = base_url('accounting/bank/reconcile-account1/account/' . $bank_account_id) . '/?';

// assign current $_GET parameters to local variable as we need to remove offset each time we rebuild query
// string otherwise it gets appended twice to url
$get = $_GET;

// unset the offset array item
unset($get['offset']);

// build first url link
$config['first_url'] = base_url('accounting/bank/reconcile-account1/account/' . $bank_account_id) . '/?' . http_build_query($get);

// if $get contains items then build these back onto the url
if (count($get) > 0) $config['suffix'] = '&' . http_build_query($get);

// set the total number of rows
$config['total_rows'] = $result['total_num_txns'];

// set the number of items per page
$config['per_page'] = $filter->limit;

// initialise the pagination config
$this->pagination->initialize($config);

Answer 1

Use the CodeIgniter 3.0 version of the Pagination Library. It has a config option to reuse the query string.

I've implemented it myself in a CodeIgniter 2, but rather than replace the distributed version , I deployed it as an overloaded library called MY_Pagination and placed it in my 'application/libraries' folder. The only code change I had to do to make this work this way was to set the access modifiers to public rather than protected.