Paginating Firebase Realtime Database in a RecyclerView within a NestedScrollView

Jordan Mungujakisa
2 min readJun 11, 2022

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Photo by Danial Igdery on Unsplash

If you’re using Firebase Realtime Database to store and retrieve data for your Android app, you may have encountered the challenge of paginating the data within a RecyclerView. This can be especially tricky when the RecyclerView is nested within a NestedScrollView, as the scrolling behavior of the scroll view can interfere with the recycler view’s scroll behavior, making it difficult to paginate data.

Paginating helps you load small chunks of data at a time. Loading partial data on demand reduces the usage of network bandwidth and system resources. When using the Cloud Firestore database, pagination can easily be achieved using query cursors. With query cursors, you can split data returned by a query into batches according to the parameters you define in your query. However, when using the Realtime Database, there is no official API for implementing pagination at the moment.

In this blog post, we’ll explore some effective strategies for paginating Firebase Realtime Database data in a RecyclerView within a NestedScrollView. We’ll discuss the benefits of using this approach and walk through the steps for implementing it in your own app. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced developer, this post will provide valuable insights and techniques for paginating your Firebase Realtime Database data in a smooth and seamless way. So let’s get started!

Getting Started:

This guide uses the architecture components so you need to be familiar with View Binding, View Models, and Live Data. I also assume you already know how to load data in a recycler view using an adapter.

BooksModel.kt

PagingAdapter.kt

BooksFragment.xml

BooksFragment.kt

SharedViewModel.kt

Output

Thank you!

If you need any help, don’t hesitate to hit me up on twitter, Github

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Jordan Mungujakisa
Jordan Mungujakisa

Written by Jordan Mungujakisa

Mobile app alchemist who is trying to transmute elegant designs, into elegant code, into beautiful mobile app experiences.

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