DynamoDB Pagination Library

This is a Java library for performing pagination on DynamoDB tables. It is a (nearly) direct extraction from awslabs/realworld-serverless-application.

Background

For most services, we use the nextToken approach used by various AWS services for pagination. Because DynamoDB does not have any sense of pages, we need to remember the last item that was retrieved and return it to the client in an opaque form.

For this, we also encrypt the token to prevent tampering or misuse.

Algorithm

We paginagte with the following decision process:

• If there are more items to fetch from the database: add a nextToken property to the response
• Otherwise set the nextToken property to null

IMPORTANT Pagination tokens should ALWAYS be seen as opaque from the client side, i.e. they should never assume or be able to decode the token structure!

We utilize the lastEvaluatedKey property for Query actions against a DynamoDB table. If this property is, set it will be processed with the following algorithms:

Serialization

base64.encode(kms.encrypt(json.serialize(lastEvaluatedKey)&<current-timestamp>))

Deserialization

json.deserialize(kms.decrypt(base64.decode(nextToken)))

Representation

The pseudo-code representation is:

<lastEvaluatedKey-encrypted>&<timestamp>