The Spry Paged View data set (or Spry Pager), is a data abstraction mechanism that provides paging capabilities for a standard data set. The pager works by reading an existing data set and extracting information from it to generate a separate batch of information for paging. For example, you can bind a paged data set to an XML data set that contains 120 rows of data. In the paged data set, you can then specify that you want to display only 20 rows of data per page. Spry breaks the data display up into six distinct pages, sets a starting and ending point for each of those pages, and provides the ability to jump from one page to another. Spry also keeps a record of where all of the rows of data are, and can, for example, immediately display the second page if the user wants to see row 32.

A key concept to understand when working with a Paged View data set is that, the data on display is in fact the entire data set. (In the preceding example, the 20 rows of data on a page would constitute the entire data set.) The number of rows (ds_rowCount) in that Paged View data set is to 20. When you jump to another page, the row count is still 20, and the new set of 20 rows again constitutes the entire data set. Only the primary XML data set contains the full 120 rows, and the pager knows how to retrieve them.