# Paginate across Pinwheel's data

Pinwheel offers a number of list endpoints to retrieve collections of data (e.g. employers, platforms, etc). When you call one of these API methods to retrieve data, you will now receive a portion (or page) of data. Rather than having to wait to receive the full collection in a single request, you can now paginate through the data with faster individual requests.

# How does pagination work?

To return pages of data for large lists, Pinwheel uses **cursor-based** pagination. A **cursor** is like a pointer; it refers to a particular point in the data and marks the boundary between pages. Our paginated endpoints will now return responses with both a list of results and a `next_cursor` pointing to the next page of data for that endpoint. This `next_cursor` can then be supplied in subsequent requests to the same endpoint to retrieve the following page of data. Once you've reached the end of the collection, the final response you receive will have a null `next_cursor`.

Requests to paginated endpoints will now all support `limit` and `cursor` parameters. The `limit` parameter is used to determine how large the result set should be, while the `cursor` parameter tells us which page of data you want. To retrieve the _first_ page of data, the `cursor` parameter should not be supplied.

The following examples illustrate how the aforementioned `limit` and `cursor` fields should be used:

See [List Employers](🔗) for an example of a paginated endpoint.